Excerpts from my chat with Nithin Babu, on LinkedIn
Nithin:
Hello Udit, Great presentation and huge take-aways from Upgrad event yesterday, One question – Does UX/UI make similar impact in B2B segments? How do you weigh the content or the product benefits versus the marketing efforts in final conversion/ sale?
Udit:
Nithin, Thanks for attending the session yesterday. It was fun interacting with you.
To answer your first question, ‘yes’ in most of the cases, UX makes a big impact and even becomes a game changer in B2B scenarios. I can pull a couple of examples from my experience-
When I was working with Cisco, I was a part of UI/UX team for the set-top boxes. Our business unit operated B2B and used to sell contracts to customers like Airtel, Tata Sky and so on. What’s interesting here was Cisco never used to make a pitch based on the hardware or security features, instead, we used to create fully functional interactive prototypes. Then these prototypes were used during the sales pitch. So actually, we used to sell the UI (or the experience), not the product. Airtel would buy exclusive rights to the UI (and features thereof) and hence making the UI/UX team a direct contributor to revenue in a B2B setup.
Another example is Kaseya, a B2B IT Management company. Kaseya sells IT management products that can be used by IT departments of SMEs to manage the IT infrastructure. IT departments receive 100s of tickets everyday and all what they care about is efficiency in resolving those tickets. Again, the entire sales pitch was made around the usability and efficiency of the product, targeting the IT Admins as the end users. The product was jam packed with features all crammed up on single screens with lot of persistent navigation bars. The product required training (of course), but once that hurdle is crossed, it used to reduce the time to resolve the tickets by a huge margin by the virtue of usability. And hence, directly impacting business.
So yes, UX plays a great role in a B2B setup. But, the role depends heavily on the business goals, target audience and scenarios. Often, the impact is directly measurable by certain metrics (like revenue earned, or time saved).
To answer your second question, I think we would need to use the lenses we talked about.
Hope this helps. 🙂
Nithin:
Hey, thanks very much for the detailed answers – truly appreciate it