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 is fascinating for doing low-level design tasks so we can focus on higher-level service and systems design."
Louis RosenfeldCoffee with Lou
January 11, 2024
"The only form of ethical persuasion that exists is when the goals of the persuader are aligned with the goals of the persuading."
Craig VillamorDesign Systems for Ethical Design
January 26, 2023
"Uber and Lyft increased traffic congestion by 40 to 50 percent in cities like San Francisco."
Dan HillStrategic design, slowdown, and the infrastructures of everyday life
April 21, 2022
"After 90 days, we had double-digit improvement on our NPS and a decreased operations cost per load."
Alana Washington(Remote) Service Design: A Transformation Case Study
June 8, 2022
"You’re going to get the importance of empathy to the bottom line."
Bria AlexanderTheme Two Intro
September 8, 2022
"Education and awareness had to be core parts of what we were doing in this shift."
Tim FrickThe journey of building a sustainable design practice
April 23, 2025
"Empathy is our greatest asset but it takes up a lot of emotional bandwidth that we must consciously manage."
Brian MossWhat Does it Mean to be a Resilient Research Team?
March 9, 2022
"Learning prompt engineering will make us better researchers in the same way coding helped designers."
Dr. Jamika D. Burge Nick Fine Alexandra Jayeun Lee Greg Nudelman Bo WangHow UX researchers can partner with (and not be replaced by) AI [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
August 31, 2023
"Often you can tell people just don’t talk, and design systems need that interpersonal stuff to work."
Dan DonaldDesign Systems as a Vehicle for Systemic Change
June 1, 2023
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
How can service design facilitate collaboration and alignment between public and private sector organizations?
How can service design artifacts like customer journey maps risk becoming just check-box exercises?
How does Nick view the relationship between creativity and constraints in sustainable design?