Taming Enterprise Complexity
An inside look at my approach to designing interconnected enterprise systems with widely spread target audiences.
MY ROLE
UI/UX Lead – converting abstract business, market, and user requirements into manageable product design artifacts.
Super IC – establishing and maintaining a cross-platform design system and pixel-perfect, delightful product design.
Close collaboration with product management, sales, support, and CSM departments.
THE CHALLENGES
Massive product stack – 6 interconnected applications reusing components and sharing resources.
Wide audience – everyone is a user, from (B2G) municipality admins to (B2B) business owners to (B2C) citizens.
Permission handling – every part of the platform has a different layout based on who is accessing it.
THE RESULTS
A robust set of focused environments, with tailored pipelines for completing specific tasks.
A problem-solving framework woven directly into the design system, structured for continuous improvement.
An aesthetic enterprise platform that is functional, modern, and friendly, resulting in high retention.
IMPACT IN NUMBERS
638% YoY increase in website adoption in the context of the full enterprise package.
57% higher engagement with core content creation features like posts and events.
51% larger number of motivated administrators interacting with and forming a connection with their pages.
3 Main Challenges
6 Connected Applications
The final platform design consists of 6 inter-dependent applications: iOS & Android User Apps, All-in-one Browser Web App, Website Builder Framework, Administration Console, and the internal platform CMS.
Re-using Components
One of the main principles when designing for a system like this is re-usability. Content components, dynamic feeds, administration interfaces and other elements need to flexible enough to be carried over operating systems and contexts - such as a social platform and an official city website.
Ensuring Consistency
Users like to interact with specific patterns when on web, iOS or Android, which means the central design system needs to both adapt to cross-platform expectations while keeping the core feeling.
Target Audience
Basically everyone can be a user but from a different point of view with different goals in different products.
B2C
B2B
B2G
The Citizens & Tourists (B2C)
The target audience of our consumer focused products is everyone living in or visiting a city. People of all ages, backgrounds and tech savyness.
However, a specific focus group was identified: heads of households, usually the mothers, who lead, coordinate and execute the daily lives.
Club & Business Owners (B2B)
The idea here is that anyone can set up and run their page, no matter the tech expertise, while making the advanced features available to those who want more from our products and are willing to learn more.
The bulk of this target group is made up of moms, pops, and young professionals with brick and mortar stores or associations.
Municipality Administrators (B2G)
Municipality administrators are expected to be more embedded in back-office workflows, which means they can to handle more complex pipelines with the help of our support team and our focused product environments.
Public workers & IT admins are a main focus point of this group.
Permission Handling
Because of the vastly different permission levels when accessing different points of the product, content needs to be highly edge-case aware.
Visiting VS. Editing
Almost every part of the product needs to be tailored towards the end users consuming content and administrators managing it.
Service Management
Each separate services can have specific permissions assigned to it such as editors which only care for the content, organization owners controlling subscriptions or website managers coordinating the site.
Forging The Path
In Complexity, Go Basic
The more a project increases in complexity, deepens in dependencies, branches off in edge cases and fractures in target audience, the more I like to return to the fundamentals of good product designs.
Tesler's Law
"Every application has an inherent amount of irreducible complexity. The only question is who will have to deal with it — the user or the developer."
Deconstructing Depth
Leaving the partners to deal with the tangle of the product stack was not an option. The way forward included breaking down all pipelines and looking into providing a tailored experience for each user task.
Fitts's Law
“The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.”
95% Use Case Obsession
Making the every day, core functionality, such as posting or editing opening times fast and intuitive was non-negotiable. Advanced action can take lower prominence for power users who need them.
Knowing The Industry
When being introduced to a new digital platform, users will expect patterns and workflows consistent with what is available as the industry standard.
This means knowing the industry inside-out, knowing exactly when to stick to the status quo and when to break it in order to provide a better experience.
Notion
Google Drive
Meta Business Suite
Stripe
Webflow
Wix
All The Socials
Putting ourselves into the shoes of a social media manager to intimately understanding the process of content creation and profile editing and was imperative. We did this by simply using the available platforms.
Collaborative Service Management
To understand the dynamics of people working together on online service management platforms we set up example workflows involving multiple tools such as Notion, Drive, Meta Business Suite and Stripe.
Website Builders
By analyzing the competitive website builders it was possible gain a basic understanding of the landscape. This was a great starting point for exploring the viability of a website linked to an existing platform.
Identifying The Cohorts
Another step towards managing the overwhelming complexity was separating the massive target audience into smaller groups.
Household Captains
A specific group of end users, mainly women running and coordinating household activities such as shopping and free time events, was identified through a combination of platform demographic data and engagement with social media posts and participation in bonus world promotions.
Ambitious Administrators
By sifting through page activity charts and filtering for characteristics such as posting frequency, amount of events and level of completion of the page profile, a core of driven, power-user administrators fully using the potential of the platform could be outlined.
Municipality Delegators
Based on the feedback of the field teams and reports from the customer support, a small group of municipality managers emerged. These would usually have a big picture overview, but would delegate the hands-on tasks such as website maintenance or content moderation.
Pooling users together in such a way provided an opportunity to compare the actions of highly successful user groups with those less engaged, and later design the product stack as to nudge everyone in the correct direction.
Thriving Within Constraints
Focused Environments
I found the most effective way of managing the expanding feature set was to provide separate, tailored environments for completing specific workflows.
Each service and sub-service is managed in a dedicated space with razor-sharp focus on the exact task at hand, while keeping quick navigation between features and products always accessible.
When an administrator is configuring a website, they operate within the website builder—where they manage content, languages, block sites, navigation, SEO, domain handling, and everything else that makes a website tick.
WEBSITES BLOWING UP
Rolling out functionality updates and UX optimizations to the website builder environment contributed to a 638% year-over-year increase in the adoption of official city websites, with incredible feedback from all municipality stakeholders.
At this point, the technical pipeline is no longer the bottleneck for releasing municipality websites, but rather the logistics and management of building up the content, resources, and approvals.
Systemic Problem Solving
One of the most important aspects of a mature design system is that it offers a framework for solving problems.
Many of the challenges we encounter on a daily basis have already been solved and can be addressed within a short development cycle by simply applying established patterns from the design system.
When a new challenge is encountered and successfully resolved, it’s best practice to take the time to incorporate any new principles back into the system—an investment in more efficient problem-solving down the line.
UNIFIED FAMILIARITY
By applying these rules, the resulting product stack is a package that feels unified across platforms and closely aligned with industry standards. This contributed to the usage of core functionality, like creating posts and events, increasing by 57%.
A continually maintained design system is a huge time and resource investment. This is why it needs to be established in a way that is conducive for efficient production of goal-oriented output.
Aesthetic Usability
When it comes to the craft of digital product design, I always lean on the principles of technical artistry from my 3D & photography background, pushing the envelope of what’s achievable on web, iOS, and Android platforms in terms of materials, rendering effects, animations, and layouts.
This is how the CITIES design system was born: incorporating a minimalist, bright, and inviting theme with card elements separating content; light gray backgrounds & shadows establishing hierarchy; warm gradients & colors guiding the focus; and rounded corners & iconography adding a friendly vibe.
In addition to building an intuitive product that addresses the user's needs, I cultivate a culture of going the extra step to spark delight. This is another move toward ensuring users keep coming back to our products.
A STRONGER BOND
The number of admins actively editing their pages and keeping contact info, image galleries, and descriptions up to date increased by 51% following the release of the updated design system.
"Users tend to believe that more attractive interfaces are easier to use, more effective, and more trustworthy."
In today's competitive industry, designing attractive products is non-negotiable. This doesn't mean adding micro-ornaments, but building the entire visual & layout system to leave a lasting impression.
Not a Solo Job
Company Lockstep
Keeping a pulse on a wide target audience, and how they interact with a diverse product portfolio, requires tightly aligned, cross-departmental sync. It’s not a “nice-to-have”; it’s "sine qua non".
Our field sales teams speak to hundreds of people from municipalities every week, mayors, administrators, and department heads, giving them a direct pulse on the market. Meanwhile, our in-house support team handles end-user issues daily, making them a valuable and immediate source of feedback.
FIELD TEAMS
Identifying surface regional differences and understanding the broader landscape. It’s not just about chasing leads, it’s about shaping the product in sync with what the market actually needs.
SUPPORT & CSM
Involved from the feature definition phase to help shape requirements. Post-launch, they extend the product’s usability by running workshops, answering calls, and writing help center guides.
Constant Validation
In an agile pipeline designed to ship fast, revolving around one-way and two-way door decisions, validation is simply a part of the process.
Beta Testing
Features go through beta testing before every release, big or small. This exposes edge cases, usability friction, and validates assumptions.
Everything happens in a password-protected staging environment or through TestFlight and Firebase beta builds, ensuring functionality passes through select partners and testers before reaching end users.
Staggered Releases
Major releases are first rolled out to a select set of partners. This smaller group helps identify critical issues early, giving the team a buffer to address problems and push iterations.
We applied this to the Waste Management service: smaller, newly partnered municipalities were the first to migrate to the upgraded backend and client versions, allowing for the monitoring of stability, performance, and UX before scaling up the rollout.
Notable Achievements
The systemic approach to managing complexity and tackling challenges allowed me to establish a goal-oriented department culture, with a balanced split of research, innovation, and high-impact output.
This enables efficient execution of product launches and iterations across multiple interconnected features in parallel.
ENTERPRISE PACKAGE
Full municipal digitalization combining both the social side of posts, events, and articles and citizen services like waste management, a bonus system, and the official notice board. Additionally, a multi-tier upgrade now allows all functionality to be mirrored on a standalone website.
CRAZY RELEASE CYCLES
In 2024, the UI/UX team conceptualized, designed, shipped, validated, and iterated on 13 major feature releases and a standalone product, while simultaneously maintaining and continuously improving the existing product portfolio.
DESIGN DEBT CLEANUP
In parallel with the product design pipelines, a full design debt cleanup was performed, migrating all legacy Adobe XD layouts to updated Figma cloud libraries, while at the same time syncing variables, tokens, and components with developers across web, iOS, and Android.
