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
"Home Depot is the sixth largest private company in the US with over 500,000 employees, yet our deliveries experience was embarrassingly bad."
Anat Fintzi Rachel MinnicksDelivering at Scale: Making Traction with Resistant Partners
June 9, 2022
"A real test of trust happened where I could confidently step away from micromanaging after we shifted online."
Smitha Papolu Nova Wehman-Brown Melissa Schmidt Adam MenterTheme 3 Discussion
January 8, 2024
"The hardest part isn’t changing diapers, it's everything else — the work around the work."
Greg BakerExploring What Decades of Expertise Can Do Outside a Traditional Tech Role
July 16, 2026
"Bringing our government Partners in early as collaborators and making a clear case for the value of research is one way that we build trust with our stakeholders."
Lisa Spitz Nikki BrandBuilding Trust Through Equitable Research Practices
November 18, 2022
"Intelligence is the pursuit of knowledge; wisdom is the pursuit of truth."
Iram ShahClosing Keynote: The View from the Top
June 4, 2019
"People will work harder for people than they will for a number."
Monty HammontreeThe Future of UX Research
December 3, 2020
"Magnification can cover the entire screen two to ten times, and users pan around to see different areas."
Sam ProulxSUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population
June 9, 2021
"Screen curtain blanks the screen for privacy and battery life, so no one can look over my shoulder."
Sam ProulxUnderstanding Screen Readers on Mobile: How And Why to Learn from Native Users
October 2, 2023
"Everybody has something to say, whether it’s a personal narrative or a feature implementation. So we run writing workshops quarterly."
Michelle MorrisonCulture Design
May 21, 2020