In recent years, b-end products are developing faster and faster. In terms of design, there are also more and more designers involved in this subdivision of interaction design industry. However, many new designers or interaction designers who transition from C-end products to B-end products will have some inadaptability after taking over B-end products.
This paper hopes to summarize some design experience of B-end products and help interaction designers with similar situations to get started and better conduct interaction design of toB products.
1. Close to users
One big difference between b-side products and C-side products is that the operator of b-side products has an obvious professional attribute. Different from the users in our daily life, users of b-end products operate the products to complete some specific tasks, such as building enterprise systems, monitoring enterprise public opinion, providing customer service, and completing data analysis. And these jobs themselves, with a certain degree of professional knowledge. Therefore, when designers design these products, the first thing to do is to understand what users think when they use these products.
In our actual work, we can mainly use the following three methods to get close to users and understand their thoughts and feelings in the operation process:
Customer call
Business rotational
User survey
1. Customer visit: In the initial stage of b-end products, there will be some enterprises as potential customers of the products. By visiting the product users of these enterprises face to face, they can quickly understand the direction and thinking of each other in the process of product use, so as to better design the scheme.
2. Business rotation: On top of customer visits, further, designers actually use corresponding B-end products, that is, business rotation. Interaction designers who are new to B-side products can start by observing the operation of actual users. During the process, they can ask and learn about the contents they do not understand. Through learning, I will gradually develop to be able to operate B-end products with the assistance of professionals, and finally be able to operate B-end products independently to complete tasks. The actual use of b-end products and related competitive products in my charge can deepen my understanding of the products I am responsible for. Only by experiencing the use feelings of front-line users can I design responsible and good products. B-side interaction designers often use their own products and rival products, and understand the development trends of product business, which is the basis for designing B-side products.
3. User survey: When customer visit and business rotation form a good mechanism, and the product develops to a certain scale, user survey questionnaire becomes a more efficient and important means to obtain users’ voice. Different from c-end products, the questionnaire for B-end products should be more detailed and candid about product functions and user experience. Regular customer questionnaire survey, can establish a good and effective customer communication mechanism, deepen the mutual understanding between products and customers.
Customer visits in the early stage of the product, job rotation in the process of product development, and planned and phased user research when the product develops to a certain scale and is relatively stable can ensure that the design and experience of b-end products are always close to users’ thoughts, and ensure that product design does not float on the surface of functions.
Understand the business
After understanding the customer, to have a deeper understanding of the customer behavior, we need to have a deeper understanding of the business corresponding to the product. The user behavior of b-end products is to complete a specific work, and such work is usually professional. A better understanding of this profession can help designers better communicate with users and design good products.
Professional learning and everyone to go to school to read similar, can participate in the relevant professional training and reading professional books. In-depth professional understanding depends on systematic and daily professional learning accumulation. Customer service industry quantitative indicators, for example, customer service satisfaction, one-time resolution rate, quality supervision, inspection, sampling, etc., these contents are the contents of the customer service personnel daily work, a better understanding of the logic of the data, and some of the major optimization method, design scheme can more effectively help users better in daily work, improve work efficiency, Finally reflect the value of the product.
3. Clear product concept
After getting close to the customer and understanding the business, b-side products need a clear product design concept. Like c-end products, b-end products also need to be clear about who the product is for, what problems it mainly solves, and what the design concept of the product is, etc. For b-end products with complex scenarios and user roles, a clear design concept is more important.
A clear design concept can narrow the relationship between products and customers.
Zendesk, for example, made a very intuitive and friendly impression with its smiling Buddha image in the early days. Meanwhile, its products are also in a warm and soft green color, which carries out user experience and product features to help customers quickly understand the product concept and ultimately impress customers.
Finding the right product design concept often involves many factors to consider, such as market research, competitive analysis and team genetics. Generally, we can use SWOT analysis to find the development direction suitable for our own products:
The status of major competitors (including potential competitors) in the market, team strengths, team weaknesses, product concepts;
Team status, team strengths, team weaknesses, possible product concepts;
The current status of the b-end industry, its future development direction, and how well its own and competitor teams fit with the industry in the future;
Considering the above three points, it is an important method to ensure the stable development of products and continuously expand the advantages of products to find the right direction for the development of the industry, where the team has certain advantages and competitors are difficult to catch up.
A few days ago, the design team held a workshop on business model. If you are interested, you can read “Value Proposition Design” or “New Generation of Business Model” and other relevant data for in-depth study of this part.
4. Strengthen weak links
B-end products are often multi-role products, including enterprise managers, employees, upstream colleagues, downstream colleagues, and so on. For a product used by multiple roles, different roles have different division of labor and focus, and the lack of function and experience of any role will reduce the use efficiency of the whole product and ultimately affect the overall effect of the product. The barrel effect is evident in b-end products.
“How much water a bucket can hold depends on its shortest piece of template.”
– The barrel effect
We take the horizontal comparison data of satisfaction of different functional modules of b-end products of NetEase as an example:
As can be seen from the chart, the function of G customer satisfaction significantly below the overall level of the product (the satisfaction degree of the corresponding function module data can be gained by the method of user survey questionnaire), and as an indispensable part of product function G, satisfaction directly affect the overall satisfaction of customer to the product, the most influence customers to buy and pay decisions.
Therefore, in the current product stage, it should be the main work of the product to strengthen the satisfaction optimization of product function G. Specific optimization content can be carried out through customer visits, business rotation and data analysis to obtain optimization items and quantified influence degree, and then optimize one by one.
5. Flexible scheme
The requirements of B-end products tend to expand with the development of enterprises, which makes it difficult for a single interaction scheme to meet the segmentation requirements of different enterprises or even the same enterprise at different stages. Therefore, in most cases, the interaction of B-end products needs to ensure the flexibility of solution expansion, so as to meet the customization requirements in different situations.
Above in the history of the seven fish netease service content, for example, for different enterprises, data display, calculation, display order item have different needs, so in view of the list component data report, we made a complete custom data items, the data show the custom, data display order custom interaction design scheme, to ensure that the enterprise flexible data set.
In this way, the customized functions of specific functional modules can effectively meet the changing needs of different enterprises at different stages, improve the user experience of customers, and reduce the overall development cost. Similar scenarios include display customization, interactive message customization, report customization, and so on. At the same time, customized solutions in line with customer needs can make products more enterprise color, improve user experience, and ensure the professional degree of products.
6. Component unification
A unified and standardized interactive component library can continuously deposit designers’ thinking, reduce design and development costs, and also reduce users’ learning costs of switching between different product modules, so as to ensure that the user experience is not interrupted during the continuous development of products. The b-end product system of the old generation is usually very complex, and new employees often need to go through a long training period before they can proficiently operate corresponding products, which should not be the case for b-end products of the new generation.
The figure above shows the evolution of the date selection component of a B-end product of NetEase. Although the scope of the product’s component library content is mostly similar, the components of the B-side product need to be constantly updated to adapt to the evolving needs of the enterprise. Date selection components from the date of the original simple choice, to increase the fast date selection, to increase the scope of the time, hours, minutes, seconds, the choice of component library of settling down, can not only satisfy the platform inside more scenes of reuse, but also can provide you with other side B products for reference, better service to the customers and business.
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1. Close to users; 2. Understand business; 3
4, strengthen the short board 5, flexible program 6, unified components
The above six points are my own experience summary in the process of ToB product interaction design, hoping to help students who are interested in or are engaged in ToB product interaction design.
Sing Sing by Lee Dong-yue
Image ✎ unsplash.com