Designing for enterprise is a different game. Unlike consumer platforms, where users and buyers are often the same person, enterprise products require designers to serve multiple stakeholders simultaneously: the end users who work with the product daily, and the decision-makers who hold the budget and define business goals. Striking a balance between the needs of both is one of the most complex and critical challenges in enterprise UX.
During my tenure as Head of Product Design and Research at BrightEdge, an SEO platform serving global enterprises, I led the transformation of our product and design practice to address exactly this challenge. We were designing a platform used by SEO practitioners, content strategists, analysts, and marketing leaders—each with unique goals, technical fluency, and usage patterns. Simultaneously, we had to win over CMOs, VPs, and procurement teams evaluating ROI and scalability.
Understand the Enterprise Buyer vs. the Daily User
The first key principle is recognizing that your primary user and your economic buyer may not be the same. Enterprise buyers care about efficiency, compliance, integration, and ROI. Daily users care about speed, ease of use, and effectiveness in their specific tasks. At BrightEdge, we developed detailed personas that spanned this spectrum, and we took it a step further—tagging every user in the platform, all contacts in our CRM, and email platforms so that anyone communicating, designing, or solving problems had immediate visibility into user needs. We deployed AI to automatically update these tags weekly and made this data seamlessly accessible across internal tools, helping drive alignment and informed decision-making company-wide.
Design for Complexity, Deliver Simplicity
Enterprise platforms are inherently complex—deep data models, integrations, roles and permissions, audit trails, and more. But complexity doesn’t have to translate into complicated UX. At BrightEdge, we introduced a design system that enabled a consistent, intuitive experience across the platform, while hiding much of the complexity behind smart defaults and progressive disclosure.
Create Stickiness through Workflow Integration
One of the best ways to reduce churn and build recurring revenue is to become deeply embedded in the customer’s daily workflow. At BrightEdge, we didn’t just integrate with adjacent tools like CMS platforms, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Facebook, and Twitter—we went further. We designed custom onboarding experiences for each persona, created tailored workflows, and developed industry-specific playbooks for provisioning. Our automation technologies, like SEO Autopilot, delivered meaningful value with minimal user input. When a platform becomes essential to how someone works every day, retention and recurring revenue naturally follow.
Measure What Matters to Each Persona
We often think of metrics in a one-size-fits-all way, but in enterprise UX, what matters to a digital analyst isn’t the same as what matters to a CMO. We created benchmarks tailored to each persona and built custom reporting using platforms like Pendo, Google Analytics, and bespoke analytics solutions. These reports were made available to design, product, and engineering teams, and fed into executive dashboards—keeping everyone aligned and attuned to how the platform was performing across different roles and user journeys.
Establish Feedback Loops at Every Level
One of our biggest wins at BrightEdge was implementing a structured feedback program that captured insights from all levels—daily users, team leads, and executive sponsors. We launched initiatives like the BrightEdge Innovation Circle, hosted user groups in major cities, and organized community events around the SEO landscape. These, along with periodic surveys and 1:1 interviews, gave us a steady pulse on customer sentiment. Just as importantly, we closed the loop with clear communication on what we heard, what we changed, and why—fostering trust, boosting adoption, and driving deeper engagement across our customer base.
Align UX Strategy with GTM and Customer Success
Design doesn’t stop at the product interface. We collaborated closely with Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success to align the entire customer journey—from onboarding and support to renewals—around a unified, user-first mindset. This cross-functional alignment helped us speak the same language across all touchpoints and played a critical role in significantly boosting adoption and retention.
Final Thoughts
Designing enterprise platforms is not about making sleek interfaces alone—it’s about building trust, meeting complex needs with clarity, and creating value at every interaction. By deeply understanding both the user and the buyer, and designing experiences that bridge their goals, we can build platforms that not only drive adoption but also fuel long-term business growth.
Whether you’re building your first enterprise product or evolving a mature platform, putting people at the center of the strategy is the surest path to scalable, sustainable success.