Delight in B2B

We’ve been led to believe B2B products are boring. The tasks are repetitive, mundane, and honestly, unlike their consumer counterparts, they aren’t cool, fun, sexy. With a few exceptions like Mailchimp, Slack, Buffer, Intercom, most struggle to create delightful experiences in the mundane.

However, I strongly believe in consumerizing B2B experiences. Just because they are meant for work, does not necessarily translate to serious. They should abide by the usual compliance, legal, privacy, yet also have some wiggle room for delight. To me, delight is unexpected, when the user says “huh, that’s cool, they thought of that”. The problem is there is no metric that measures delight, but you can always look for validation in the qualitative.

So how do you create delight in B2B experiences?

I am a big fan of Airbnb’s approach of working backward from an 11-star experience, but this is difficult to scale in B2B when the feature release velocity is so high. I use this 3 step approach:

1. Goals: It doesn’t happen if you’re not thinking about it. You need to bake in your delight goals with your roadmap goals (increase revenue, reduce churn, improve customer satisfaction). Pick a goal around efficiency: “can I get my user to complete this task in less than a minute” and continue to optimize it. Another approach could be to look at the solution as will this make my user say “ah! that’s a nice touch”. And you don’t have to be grand in everything, the devil is in the details.
2. Ideas: While generating ideas, I like to use the IDEO approach of “How might we enable<insert user task>”. Combine that with Maslow’s pyramid of needs particularly targeting the Proficiency and Creativity layer.

For Proficiency, I segment users based on their expertise. Using the HXC (high expectation customers) the metric I try to improve is around efficiency. I also see if I can translate some of the consumer experiences into B2B. Your user can even have the most boring job in the world, but don’t forget they are users of other consumer apps as well. Why distinguish their experiences then?

3. Prioritize: Your roadmap should always be a combination of quick wins, delights, and standard workflow items. Your quick wins are an indication of your acknowledgment of user feedback, your standard workflow is your must-haves and delights are the cherry on top.

Putting theory in practice: Some of the delights I used in my product (an end to end hiring platform with sourcing, crm, ats, and reporting apps)

1. Keyboard shortcuts/hotkeys: Most commonly used, but so easy to forget while building. Your typical up, down, right, left arrow keys for navigation, tab, shift+tab for advancing while filling forms, and hotkeys for formatting. Use Fitt’s law as a guiding principle while thinking of adding shortcuts to your product.
2. Visual elements: Colors, styles, formatting, images, when used correctly can really help reduce the cognitive overload while processing a lot of data. While using colors stick to the design principles so as to not confuse their meanings.
3. Animations: Use with caution. If it’s a one-time event, by all means, go big, but if it's repetitive, you don’t want to cause design fatigue. Definitely not at the cost of compromising efficiency. For example, we animated the left shark dance in our product when a user made their first hire with the product. The next time though, it was replaced with a warm confirmation message with confetti.
4. Previews: While page views can be an important metric for improving engagement, it’s a sheer waste of time for the user. Why would you force the user to navigate away from their current app, if they can finish the task in that same app? You can guide the user with a preview of what they are about to see before clicking. One rule I learned in building B2B products, was fewer clicks. And adding previews was an excellent way to address that. Like we used an icon for showing if there was a resume on file and added hovers that showed the entire resume.
5. Confirmations/Error messages: They are called “messages” for a reason, make them human. Friendly does not necessarily have to translate to cutesy. Keep them short, and easy to understand. For instance, our product could identify if a user was offline. Since this would impact their workflow, we framed the message as “No internet connection. Time for coffee”
6. Quick Cmd Z: Once again, as humans, we are prone to errors and mistakes. After learning the costly lesson of fixing them, my approach changed towards preventing them. The auto-save, draft is something that Medium uses as well, which gives such a peace of mind while composing articles. We used a similar function and also added it such that users could continue their task on different devices. Another example was adding an artificial delay of 10 mins before an important action.

All of these may not necessarily translate to a specific metric, but in this day and age, with big distractions, and low attention spans, these small delights can make a big dent in your users’ otherwise chaotic day.