Chapter 39. Not All Interfaces Need to Be Simplified
Morgane Peng
Whereas consumer products are aimed at the individual, enterprise products cater to complex organizations. They are designed for business professionals or employees.
A common temptation is to oversimplify these enterprise products—I see this mistake in many design interviews.
Get Familiar with Enterprise Products
To understand what “good design” is in the enterprise space, you have to get familiar with enterprise products and understand the difference between business and interface expertises. This will help you find the sweet spot between the “not too simple” and the “not too complicated.”
Every mainstream app has an advanced equivalent for its professional users or internal employees: travel agents, visual effect artists, financial traders, and so on. Their applications are tailored to their specific professional usages and are complex for a reason. These users often need to see a lot of information at a glance to quickly make informed decisions, compare data points, or see the status of multiple systems at once.
When we designers try to oversimplify an interface, we are not enabling efficiency for the users: we are actually making the product more difficult to use by obscuring interactions and data!
Differentiate Business Expertise and Interface Expertise
The key lies in understanding the difference between ...
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