Guide #024: How to approach UX design for B2B digital products

Design solutions will need to take into consideration at least three stakeholders: your primary user - the person interacting with your platform, the customers of your primary user, and the company you work for. Understand how your company will gain value from solving the problems being explored. As your user base grows—for example, from hundreds to thousands—your design processes will feel more like B2C. Ultimately your end-user is an individual.

When designing workflows for your features or products, understand how the actions of your users and stakeholders affect the data. During your workflow, at what stage is your product receiving data? At what stage is your user providing data? Are there any other entities that provide data that enable the workflow to be completed? Capturing the journey of data will help you find opportunities that might otherwise be missed.

When designing within MVP requirements, also have an understanding of future, post-MVP growth. Ask your product manager if any post-MVP requirements exist, or if there is any user feedback or feature requests that are being held for after MVP work is completed. It might also be the case that your developer cannot implement your full design within the allotted time. Being aware of the current limitations as well as future plans will help you create solutions that are scalable over time.

Create profiles for the different types of users within your user base. Utilize these personas to identify who the best participants should be for pilots or research studies. For example, when piloting a new feature, consider testing it with your expert persona first. Design your “happy path” user flows around this subset of users. Understand the problems of your expert persona user group, collect feedback, implement and then expand to a wider user base. Plan new research studies and continue collecting feedback as you expand to wider audiences.