Introduction
In user experience design, there are certain rules we tend to apply automatically because they work in most contexts. As a general rule, these UX/UI best practices improve the look and function of the applications we design. However, design is context, and when the context is the interface design of internal company applications, and the users are the people who work for those companies, these UX/UI design rules don’t fully apply. Therefore, based on my experience working for multinationals and international consulting firms, I’ve written a list of UX design tips for designing business tools, corporate software, and internal applications, so you don’t make the same mistakes.
Definition of business tool or internal tool
A business tool is an application that supports a company’s internal processes, including resource management, process optimization, data analysis, security, reporting, automation, and decision-making support.
They are often used in multinational companies and consulting firms with thousands of employees. They support highly complex processes, with strict regulations, complicated information architectures, and vast amounts of data. They are usually (but not always) internally developed, are hopefully interconnected, and are exclusively for internal use within that company.
Designer, you are sorely missed
If you’ve ever had the opportunity to use an internal enterprise tool, you’ll have noticed that they all fail to meet the most common recommendations for user experience, interface design, and basic interaction. It’s normal: they are rarely updated, and these applications have been designed without the advice of an expert in user research, interaction, and UX/UI design. They have also been designed without the guidance of the people who will be using them, so they don’t fit the users’ mental model, but rather the logic and usability concept of a project manager, developer, or business analyst.
The good news is that you’ll find things worthy of a user experience museum of horrors. This will give you plenty of examples of what not to do.
✅ UX Tip:
Be humble. Most of the time, you’re looking at the best possible design in the context and resources at that time. Introduce user research and UX methodologies gradually, seeking collaboration and understanding. Establish basic processes that align with development timelines. Define a common language and focus on simple, high-impact changes. Always provide user insights that are as actionable as possible. The good news is that any small improvement you can implement will have a significant impact on user satisfaction, ease of use, and efficiency.
Example of a Workday dashboard, a very common application in companies for human capital management. Although its UI has improved and no longer looks like this, its use remains chaotic and very unintuitive. You might think I’ve gone too far and thought it’s outdated, but it’s quite common to find business applications with UX/UI design at this level..
Why do they survive if they are so poorly designed?
The main reason is that the user neither chooses nor pays for the tool they’ll use. The tool is imposed by the company, and the user has to adapt. Any failure is more associated with the user’s incompetence and lack of training than with poor design.
✅ UX Tip:
Users have a different profile than we’re used to. They tend to be more technologically savvy, familiar with the product, and more tolerant of tool design flaws. Be patient when gathering valuable feedback from users. They often work in an environment where there’s no user experience culture or maturity, so they’re likely not used to expressing their opinions, proposing improvements, and having their opinions heard. Important: When discovering opportunities for improvement, focus on what they do and how they do it, not on what they say.
Complex domains require complex systems
You’ll likely feel like you don’t understand anything about the product and the systems you’re tasked with designing. The worst part is that you’ll likely never fully understand them. This will significantly limit your ability to contribute to improving the product and its processes. Your design may even need to be supported by user training; this doesn’t make it a worse design. Not all systems can be operated intuitively. Eliminating and simplifying isn’t always an option.
✅ UX tip:
Approach the challenge piecemeal and in parts. Educate yourself well. It’s quite possible that a solution has been attempted before and failed, or that there are already existing solutions. You’ll be surprised to discover the number of internal business applications that are duplicated or do similar things. Don’t be embarrassed to ask for every detail. Seek help to introduce you to the product and simplify complex information into simpler or even visual language. Embrace complexity; not everything can be simplified or fit into familiar patterns. Your ignorance can be very useful in proposing different ideas and original alternatives.
Screen space is very valuable
If you’re coming from a customer-focused, B2C design background, you’ll want to design screens that are legible, balanced, lightweight, with good hierarchy, spacing, etc., that allow information to be easily assimilated without overwhelming the reader. One common way to achieve this is by exaggerating space and size to link or unlink elements. It’s a basic law of human perception: we tend to create groups of elements that are close together.
However, internal tools handle a lot of data. Users have to make decisions quickly based on the information they see on the screen. Therefore, the more information they see on the screen, the better decisions they can make. And yes, screens can get very large.
✅ UX tip:
Embrace the horror vacui. Use very tight spacing and small font sizes. Avoid truncating text. Apply typographic scaling to create hierarchies with tight incremental differences. A good trick is to use the font family (regular, semibold, bold) to create hierarchy using the same font size. You can also play with saturation and grayscale. Keep responsive design in mind; devices can vary greatly, from laptops to high-resolution monitors (we’ll talk about mobile devices later). One trick is to contact technical support and ask for a list of the computers and monitors delivered, and see what the most common resolutions are.
By the way, be very careful with readability. Make sure the contrast between content and background follows accessibility rules.
Prioritize what you direct your attention to
Regarding the issue of space, since you can’t use emptiness and size to direct attention, you’re likely to overuse separator lines and colour. If you have an interface with a lot of data and tables, where you can’t use space, you’ll use lines and separators.
You’ll also have graphs, statuses, alerts… It’s possible that the screen will end up becoming saturated with colors. The biggest problem with color is that it doesn’t scale. There are already three colors, plus two, that you can’t use to classify content because they are semantic throughout the UI: green, positive; yellow, attention; red, critical. The fourth is blue for links. The fifth is the brand color. The rest of the available colors are starting to become difficult to distinguish from each other. It also becomes more difficult to maintain readability. Add that they work well in dark mode.
✅ UX tip:
Separators are often a good option, but don’t clutter the screen and avoid creating cells and boxes. Either a vertical or horizontal separator, but be careful with both. While they may be necessary in very dense tables, a vertical one is usually unnecessary. Play with the thickness and grayscale to make them more invisible.
On each screen, select what’s most important to the user at any given time: errors, successes, or alerts. Try to highlight only part of the element. Instead of using a full background color, such as coloring an entire cell in a table, use a small icon next to the information. For important cases, you can add a color to the icon. Don’t use color to categorize content with unlimited growth, as it will lose its categorization power. Mute your color palette, reducing its saturation to make it less striking while retaining its categorization power.
Take advantage of peripheral vision’s ability to capture anomalous information, placing alerts and statuses at the edges of in-focus elements—for example, in the last column of a table. Avoid using images to identify users if they’re not the main content; the human brain has a specific area for recognizing faces; this will make a human face steal the spotlight within an interface.
Oh! And very important: don’t use color alone to convey information or a change of state. Remember that many people suffer from color blindness. Use visual reinforcements and, if it’s very important, even movement or sound.
Ejemplo de una aplicación con una tabla de datos donde el contenido compite entre sí por la atención del usuario. Los colores de las etiquetas se han ido de control. Fuente: Dribbble.
Excel is their first love
When you have to design an interface for a company with a lot of table-based data, you’ll be overwhelmed with references to Excel. It’s normal to have it work like Excel, look like Excel, edit like Excel, export to Excel… It’s the only reference they have and are used to.
✅ UX tip:
Understand the logic of the design reference they’re asking for. Typically, it’s the value of having immediacy in interacting with the data, without losing context and immediate, on-the-fly updates. But most applications don’t work like Excel, which is like working directly on the database. This can lead you to try to design very innovative interactions, which brings us to the next point.
Embrace classic design
The usual approach is to look for texts and recommendations with best practices or original ideas for displaying data, designing tables, editing, etc. But these tips are based on very specific cases that are mixed, contradict each other, or are even unrealistic. They look good, but they don’t work when you want to apply them to real data, in real situations, with real processes.
Complex systems need to be able to adapt and scale. Content defines the form: use cases are updated, data types and their handling change, and perhaps parts of the product are not 100% defined. If you design a highly original, even innovative, interaction, it may be good for the specific case, but it’s quite possible that it won’t work for everyone. This will force you to create exceptions, breaking consistency. An innovative interaction will likely require more development; there may be limitations due to the tool, framework, design system, or technology used, or there may be dependencies on legacy code.
✅ UX tip:
Adopt classic, well-proven patterns. Understand the rationale behind each pattern. For example, never place actions next to content that can grow or shrink, such as the bottom of a table. In an effort to simplify and save space, you may remove the names from icons. This makes them difficult to understand. Avoid hiding important actions under certain actions, such as hover or kebab menus. This makes them difficult to discover. Remember that users aren’t afraid of information; they need it.
Guidelines for the 16-pixel padding a cell should have within a data table. This is part of a popular Figma library. In the real world, users will demand that you display three times as many rows in the same space.
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Your user research is a 60-page BRD
It’s very common to receive projects where the problem and solution are already defined. Extremely defined. The application is defined based on very specific users with significant decision-making power. The problem is that they aren’t validated using user research tools in conjunction with the users who will actually use them most of the time.
✅ UX tip:
Align your user research requirements with the company’s strategy and business objectives. Speak their language. If the objectives are security-related, explain how good design can prevent errors. If the objective is financial, explain how efficient interface design saves time. Make it easy for your project manager to share this information with their own superiors.
However, you won’t always be able to follow the double diamond design approach. It’s very common, and it’s not a bad idea. Often, you’ll lack the knowledge, skills, and time to understand the problem leaders want to solve. Trust. Design the idea and then explore. Test with users to see if the idea works, and then pivot. You’ll be able to test the solution and, using that information, direct resources toward understanding the problem. Adapt the design process to the team’s needs and capabilities, not the other way around.
The user sits next to you
In relation to the user tests mentioned in the previous point, two advantages of designing internal tools are access to users, because they are people who work for the same company. The second is that you may also be an employee, and therefore the user. This makes recruiting for research, interviews, and usability testing much easier. However, it’s not as simple as it seems. Some profiles are quite inaccessible due to their level of hierarchy and responsibility; it’s also quite possible that many people are overloaded with work and don’t have time.
The good news is that there will be much more transparency in return. After all, we’re all in the same boat.
✅ UX tip:
Define clearly what you need and why you need it. Ask for help when recruiting. Contextual research is a very effective UX tool in the context of enterprise application design, as you’ll gain valuable behavioural insights with a few users. Insist that you want to observe users performing actions and completing tasks, not conduct interviews, surveys, or a list of requirements. Tools are usually customized based on roles and permissions; basically, your persona profiles will be roles that perform specific tasks. Large companies often have an employee index by category, domain, position, country, level, and nomenclature. This will make searching and filtering easier.
Fortunately, the most inaccessible users tend to delegate many tasks. Find the role or delegated person who can perform those tasks for them. Poor statistical validation will be the biggest drawback to your results. Accept that you won’t always be able to access an adequate number of users; use the limited information you have as an indication of possible aspects that need attention. Triangulate the information with analytics and surveys to find greater validation.
Bonus: mobile phone and email
Unfortunately, enterprise apps are often not available for mobile devices. The reasons are often due to data and process complexity, development resources, or complex security requirements. Furthermore, when they are available, they are usually available for a very limited number of mobile phone models. Therefore, many employees will not be able to install the app on their devices.
Another double-edged sword is email. It’s very common to have the work email app installed on their phone, along with other messaging and online meeting apps, because they’re very effective in any context. The downside is that employees at multinationals and large corporations receive tons of emails every day. So they’re likely to automatically ignore notifications from your app.
✅ UX tip:
Always keep the mobile device in mind, as it adds a lot of value. In some cases, you may even be able to develop it. Focus first on features that allow you to resolve workflows and unblock processes: view statuses, approve or reject, verify relevant information, receive alerts, and complete actions.
Without a mobile app, you can use your email app as an ally. Think carefully about the value of the notifications you send. Set up a notification configurator in your app so users can customize what, how, and when they receive a notification. It’s very important to inform users that this configurator exists. Finally, add value to your emails, avoid jargon and machine language, be clear, and, most importantly, offer the option to take action from the email itself without having to enter the app.
In conclusion
This is a summary of the points and peculiarities of UX/UI design for internal tools that I’ve encountered in my day-to-day work, and how I think they should be addressed. I wrote this text because it’s very common to end up working on these types of business applications, but since they’re not very glamorous and their development is usually very limited, you’ll only find fictional examples that look great but don’t work in real-life contexts. Designers simply blindly apply these tips and the most common UX/UI design rules, but they don’t really work, because they have to be highly nuanced to the context. I hope these tips, based on my real-life experience, will help you.
Greetings, Raúl Redondo