When a team has a strong belief and desire for action, great things will happen. We believe no one needs to suffer from badly designed products. In 2019, the AR/VR Commerce Design team started the Consumer-grade Design initiative and created a movement in Enterprise Products to elevate the design bar for business and internal tools. With a large portion of consumer-facing projects that the AR/VR Commerce Design team has already been doing, we are at a perfect intersection to bring consumer design thinking into the portfolio of Commerce Engineering internal products. Since then, the awareness of Consumer-grade Design has been amplified. I can feel the positive vibes from people of various disciplines, curious about what Consumer-grade Design is and conversing on how we can start building high quality and delightful enterprise products that people would love to use.

The birth of the Consumer-grade Design concept happened more than a decade ago. Ever since the rise of consumer-grade enterprise products, we have seen product successes like Dropbox, Asana, and Slack, where multi-billion dollar valuations were created by solving business problems at scale – creating products that are beautiful, intuitive to use, reducing the user learning curve, and ultimately making users feel as individuals. More than buzz-words, Consumer-grade Design is a set of principles that help guide the decisions that designers make to push the limit of usability, performance, and challenge the legacy enterprise software stereotype. We have seen many B2B products struggle to make use of modern, bold, and fresh ideas when it comes to designing experiences despite having large teams of in-house designers or spending huge budgets for external design consultancies. Adopting a Consumer-grade Design practice is easier said than done because designers are often not the end-users. These products are complex, technical, and rarely within reach in our daily lives. Even when we are bringing Consumer-grade Design into our design process, coupling it with the User-centered Design approach of observing, listening, and understanding our users through research is a crucial factor for building products that are not only functional but also engaging and pleasurable to use.

When designers approach design problems, whether a product is consumer or enterprise oriented is irrelevant. There are no rules to mandate more intuitive design solutions and pixel-perfect quality are only for consumer products. One certain thing is that human psychology including their cognition, emotion, and interaction with the world will always remain the same. In the end, people of all kinds no matter whether they are technical people, non-technical people, people at work, people not at work, are all everyday people who want to be able to get their jobs done and do them better with the help of the tools provided. Products that pay attention to the intricate human psychology, win over the users every time. With this outcome in mind, the AR/VR Commerce Design team went through a series of workshops last year debating and defining the Consumer-grade Design principles that would now govern us to orchestrate end-to-end experiences that place enterprise users at the front and center of our products.

Four Consumer-grade Design Principles

Welcome, guide and teach
Engage people from the moment they start to use your product. Teach them step by step, showing them what they need to know and how to accomplish their goals. Don’t assume prior knowledge and help them find guidance whenever they need it.

Make the complex simple
Show the right things at the right time in the right context. Create a sense of order in the information architecture and visual hierarchy, making important elements stand out. It should always be obvious where you are and where you need to go next.

Express an identity
Make your product lovable. Use design elements — interactions, color, iconography, illustration — and language with the right tone to give your product an identity. Be intentional with how you show personality and create a connection with people.

Put people in charge
Help people adapt to your product, designing for flexibility as organizations, teams, and individuals’ needs grow. Give them tools to customize and personalize, but don’t be afraid to provide guidelines when necessary.

What Consumer-grade Design is not

Consumer-grade Design is not solely about making a product pretty. When the AR/VR Commerce Design team first started the initiative, we went through a dubiety phase. We strived to avoid the put lipstick on a pig trap. The team explored designs with illustrations and added color to find the right balance of beauty and function. When illustrations are used, they carry meaning and are not just for decoration. When color is applied, it provides signals and invites shared understanding that is legible to users. Consumer-grade Design is about modernizing how products look and rethinking how they work to make human's jobs possible and enjoyable.

Consumer-grade Design is not about making enterprise products into consumer products. The array of features in enterprise products will remain because these products are technical. The end goal of Consumer-grade Design is to buff and smooth every sharp edge and corner so that the product is perceived as simple and friendly to use. It is about designers using their knowledge and recognizing patterns of behaviours to help users manage the complexity through an intentionally designed interface. For example, the AR/VR Commerce SILK product is a powerful internal tool that has all the bells and whistles for merchandising, inventory management, and fulfillment logistics. It has many thought-out features. Instead of making it into a hyperbolized tool, we talked to users and understood their needs. Statically, people may use 20%-30% of the features to complete key tasks in most enterprise applications. To help users manage complexity, we set out a role-based design direction and surfaced the useful features tailored to each person’s role. In a way, we are building a tool for people that understands the user as an individual. Designs are inevitable when they anticipate how people will use them so well that complexity would become unnoticeable.

Consumer-grade Design is not a responsibility restricted to designers. The perception of performance and responsiveness has long been established by consumer applications that people interact with every day and the same expectation applies to enterprise applications. We are setting out to be a product-focused organization to build great products. It is not enough to have a good design while the product is engineered with sluggishness and unreliable performance. History has demonstrated to us that design and engineering excellence must coexist for products to achieve the greatest success. Modern architect pioneer Le Corbusier introduced a modernist lifestyle aesthetic "machine of inhabit" in 1925 that stripped away overt ostentation in favor of clean and streamlined design language that embodied the Bauhaus design belief that beauty can be found at the interaction of aesthetics and engineering. More than ever, Consumer-grade Design is a responsibility that will require designers, engineers, and product owners to collaborate in building great products together.

The encouraging news is that the Consumer-grade Design concept is not new and we are actively promoting the importance and putting it into practice in enterprise products. Investing in Consumer-grade enterprise products pays off in the long run because they engage people, drive adoption, improve efficiency, and benefit our company as a whole.