Reflecting on designing for the b2b industry

I joined the Freshmarketer design team at Freshworks in November 2021. Freshmarketer is a marketing automation tool that helps businesses in managing contacts, designing and delivering marketing campaigns over email, WhatsApp, SMS, chat and social media.

Before working with Freshworks, I had brief experience designing for B2B in my first stint with Elucidata, a bioinformatics company. It was the first time I got a glimpse of the complexity involved in understanding a B2B product and its use cases.

Due to the unfamiliarity of this industry, the two key challenges that I personally faced while designing for Freshmarketer were -

Challenge 1 — Empathizing with users

At the beginning, I had questions about the general landscape of the industry and the mental model of users.

• Why do users need a marketing automation tool? How Freshmarketer or any other similar tool adds value to their day-to-day activities?

• How do these users think?

• What motivates them?

• What is their role in the company?

• What was the typical process for them before considering Freshmarketer and why it was not working for them?

There was a lot to familiarise myself with to get over that distant feeling of not understanding this user. Unlike my previous experiences with B2C, there wasn’t any personal behavioural overlap with the user I was designing for.

As I began to work on features a few months into the organization, it was time to dig deeper into those features’ context. For example, when we began revamping the email campaign feature, we had a lot of questions like-

• What is the current process for users using Freshmarketer?

• What are the difficulties they face?

• How have competitors solved this?

Solution

There is a simple solution to this challenge — user research. But…what if there is no user research team?

B2B users are not easily accessible. They are individuals accountable for meeting the KRAs set by their organization, using the tools purchased by the departmental head or employer. They don’t have time to answer our questions. We began to explore ways to gain insights into our users and hence, began shadowing sales and onboarding calls.

When working on a specific feature, we discovered other ways to understand our users better with whatever information we already had -

• Talking to the support team

• Talking to the onboarding team

• Reviewing raised issues on chat and ticketing platform

One of the key things I learned was that the decision maker (Buyer persona) is different from the User persona in most of the cases. And at different stages of their lifecycle, they have different needs and concerns. I’ll talk about these stages in detail some other time.

"In the end, businesses want an efficient and cost-effective product to keep the organization running."

Challenge 2 — Overwhelming amount of information in the UI

As a SaaS product that is aimed at businesses of varying sizes in different industries, it needs to cater to their different needs. It is one of the problems that we encounter on a regular basis: how to surface the relevant features for any business? In a UI that is table heavy and has many data points, how do you prioritize one over another?

Solution

Often, it is an information architecture exercise. I have usually found a solution in the fundamental design guidelines -

• Group similar settings or actions together

• Use an accordion or slider to show second order information

• Progressive disclosure

• Design for different screen sizes to make sure that the UI doesn’t break

Design can only do so much at times. A crucial step is ruthlessly prioritizing data in partnership with PMs. Recently, we also worked on an onboarding questionnaire to personalize the product for different businesses on the basis of needs, size and industry.

Putting these into practice is easier said than done. And it is something we are working towards.