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
"Some product managers just skipped getting customers involved in the development process at all."
Veevi RosensteinBuilding for Scale: Creating the Zendesk UX Research Practice
January 8, 2024
"Participation without the redistribution of power is an empty and frustrating process for the powerless."
Sha HwangThe First Fifty Years of Civic Design
November 16, 2022
"Dark patterns are UI designs that trick or manipulate users into doing something they wouldn't otherwise do or that go against their or society’s best interests."
Craig VillamorDesign Systems for Ethical Design
January 26, 2023
"We can start small, test and validate quickly with a three-week tag team—one PM, one designer, one researcher."
Ted NewardTheme 4: Enterprise Organizational Journey
June 4, 2019
"Automations and template buttons in Notion enabled us to build consistent onboarding workflows that are reusable and interactive."
Scott StephensThe Next Generation in DesignOps Toolsets
July 28, 2022
"If you’re dealing with someone more senior who won’t engage, appeal to how the problem affects their responsibilities."
Joshua GravesWe Need To Talk: Addressing Unmet Expectations (Part 2 of 3)
April 28, 2025
"Cloud code wasn’t programmed to do this; it’s a very lightweight system where the model does most of the work."
Peter Van DijckHands on AI #3: Claude Code for UX people
October 22, 2025
"When we first thought about this topic, we quickly realized we needed to point the finger at ourselves because we've exhibited some of these behaviors."
Jason Mesut Martina Hodges-Schell Jose CoronadoUnmasking Design Leadership: Navigating leadership without neglecting ourselves
October 30, 2025
"I was not able to come up for them to be involved so I had to learn how to structure it in a way that we could share how this was important for the team."
Benjamin RealMaturity Models: A Core Tool for Creating a DesignOps Strategy
October 1, 2021
