The appification of everything has made everyone an early adopter.

That being the case, companies cannot afford to let the user experience of their apps, services, IT admin portals, their website – or anything else for that matter – suffer as they go about building their products.

Companies that build apps and sell B2B products often get bogged down in the sale, shifting their focus to the next customer instead of understanding how they can make existing relationships even stronger.

Instead of following that path, companies would be wise to take a step back and first realize the importance of specifically focusing on the design functions of other areas of the company.

Luckily, by taking a holistic look at the user experience at every level and understanding the design process, companies can ensure each facet of their operations is fortified. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five design lessons that can take your company to the next level.

The most important lesson to learn from design is the power of clearly defining your audience.

Fuze went on a mission to focus on who used our products and which ones they used. At the highest level, we validated that our users work in several disciplines (sales, marketing, support) at medium and large companies. But we needed to dig deeper and find out more about our audience. What is a day in the life of the average user like? Why, specifically, will they be using our products? Why do they use our apps instead of our competitors or consumer apps?

The more thoroughly you answer these questions, the easier it will be for you to solve your customers’ problems effectively.

Make Sure That Your Entire Team Is On the Same Page

It’s certainly not difficult to get caught up in over-designing a solution to technology problems. But whether it’s revamping internal IT systems for billing and auditing or recreating a new feature, you need to be listening to the people who interface with use it directly. They’re the ones who understand best how the product works and how it can be improved through your design.

At Fuze, we recently looked at ways to build more self-service into our new customer onboarding process. Our product team spent several days watching over the shoulders of the engineers that work directly on the onboarding process, given us a much deeper understanding of their pain points and what opportunities there are to improve the process.

Use Metrics That Will Actually Tell You How Your Customers Are Using the Product

It is critical to track KPIs to determine precisely how engaged your users are. This data can help you determine, among other things, whether your users are coming back—and if not, why.

Consumer apps do this in every part of their app. Top-tier consumer apps like Instagram and Facebook meticulously study their engagement funnels and onboarding. Instagram tries to think about the way users actually use the app and where they get delight. You can apply these concepts to every type of product at your company. For example, at Fuze we track metrics like “Total messages sent and received”, “Total phone vs. video calls”, “Time to start a meeting”, and many others.

Similarly, you can use a net promoter score (NPS) during your users flows to determine how well, on a scale of 1 to 10, an interaction went. You can combine this with engagement data from Mixpanel to gauge whether people are happy with your product. Those who aren’t will go somewhere else to find a better experience. You need to understand why.

Get all Employees Involved

When we went through the rebrand of ThinkingPhones to Fuze, our design team built an internal website to allow anyone in the company to understand and interact with the new corporate language and logo. This site also went into detail as to why the rebrand was occurring in the first place.

The end result? Employees felt as though they were involved in the rebranding process and that their opinions and ideas mattered.

Craft a Personality

In the world of enterprise software, we often don’t think about the voice of the product.

Building a product personality allows people to interact with it. To determine the voice of your product, ask yourself what the application does and what kind of tools it uses.

Because voice comes from language, tone, and personality, everything from billing invoices to the language in your mobile app updates are opportunities to drive up emotional engagement with your users. In Fuze’s case, we build and test things like the audio conferencing tone people hear when waiting to join a Fuze meeting. This enables us to provide a better, more wholesome experience that drives user engagement and delight with our products.

Takeaway

At Fuze, the fundamental principles of design impact everything we do as a company across all of our business units. It’s no longer just about designing a good product anymore. Everything your company designs—from internal tools to websites and everything in between—needs to be exceptional, too.