Taming Enterprise Complexity
An inside look at my approach to designing interconnected enterprise ecosystems with sweeping target audiences.
MY ROLE
UI/UX Lead – providing direction by converting abstract business, market, and user requirements into feasible chunks.
Super IC – establishing and maintaining a cross-platform design system and producing pixel-perfect product design.
Close collaboration with product management, sales, support, and CSM departments.
THE CHALLENGES
Massive product stack – 6 interconnected applications sharing components, resources, and data.
Wide user base – everyone is a user, from (B2G) municipality admins to (B2B) business owners and (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 and the rollout of the full enterprise functionality.
57% higher engagement with core content creation features like posts and events.
51% higher amount of motivated administrators interacting with and forming a connection with their pages.
Main Challenges
Six Interlinked Applications
The final platform structure consists of six inter-dependent applications: iOS & Android User Apps, All-in-one Browser Web App, Standalone Websites, Administration Console, and the internal platform CMS.
Re-using Components
Content components, dynamic feeds, admin interfaces, and other elements need to be flexible enough to work across operating systems and contexts - such as a social platform and an official city website.
Ensuring Consistency
Users like to interact with familiar patterns when on web, iOS or Android, which means the central design system needs to both adapt to platform-specific patterns and keep the CITIES soul intact.
Wide Target Audience
The fact that everyone can be a user, but in a different context and with different goals in mind, is a challenge in itself.
Citizens & Tourists (B2C)
The target audience of the consumer-facing products are all citizens and visitors of a city. People of all ages, backgrounds, and tech savviness.
Club & Business Owners (B2B)
The idea here is that anyone can set up and run their page, no matter the expertise, while advanced features are available to those who want more from the products and are willing to learn.
Municipality Administrators (B2G)
Municipality administrators are presumed to be more embedded in back-office workflows, which means they are expected to handle complex pipelines inside the focused service environments.
Layered Permissions
Because of the vastly different permission levels when accessing different parts of the product, content needs to be highly edge-case-aware.
1 Screen - 16 Layouts
Almost every part of the product needs to be tailored for both end users consuming content and administrators managing it, which means each screen must respond to a large number of layouts.
Layouts extend across permission levels and operating systems.
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 branching of the product stack was not an option. I took on the deconstruction of all pipelines and the exploration of providing tailored experiences for each 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 everyday functionality, such as posting or editing opening times, fast and intuitive was non-negotiable. I addressed this by decreasing the affordance of power-user features to clear up the IA.
Knowing The Industry
Users expect digital platforms to work within a set of established patterns.
This required us to know the industry inside and out, to navigate between sticking to the status quo and breaking it to provide a better experience.
Notion
Google Drive
Meta Business
Stripe
Webflow
Wix
The Socials
I put myself in the shoes of a social media manager and used existing platforms to create posts and manage profiles.
Content & Service Management
I set up example workflows using multiple content management tools to better understand the human dynamics of online collaboration.
Website Builders
I built example websites in market-leading tools to understand the landscape and form a concept for a website linked to a social platform.
Identifying The Cohorts
Separating the massive target audience into distinct cohorts enables me to identify positive and negative usage patterns. With this information, I can nudge underperforming users in the direction of high-achieving cohorts.
Household Captains
A specific group of end users, mainly women, who run and coordinate household activities such as shopping and free-time events.
Identified through a combination of platform demographics and social media engagement.
Ambitious Administrators
A core group of driven, power-user administrators using the full potential of the platform.
Identified by analyzing page activity charts and filtering for characteristics such as posting frequency, number of events created, and level of profile completion.
Municipality Delegators
A group of municipality managers with a big-picture overview who delegate hands-on tasks such as website maintenance or content moderation.
Identified through feedback from field teams and reports from customer support.
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 objectives.
Each service and sub-service is managed in a dedicated setting with razor-sharp focus on the exact task at hand.
Everything In One Place
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 new features and UX optimizations to the website builder contributed to a 638% year-over-year increase in the adoption of official city websites, with incredible feedback from all municipality stakeholders.
Systemic Problem Solving
Two of the most important aspects of a mature design system is that it offers centralized control and a framework for solving problems.
750+ Components & Variables
When building the design system I established 4 master files, for web, iOS, Android, and visuals, with over 750 components and variables.
These were connected to 6 layout files, one for each product, which allows for independent control over use-cases, edge-cases, breakpoints, render effects and so much more.
Efficiency & Innovation
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 resolved, its principles are incorporated back into the system for 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%.
Aesthetic Usability
In the craft of digital product design, I always lean on the technical principles from my 3D and photography background, pushing the envelope of what’s achievable in terms of materials, rendering effects, and animations.
This is how the CITIES style was born: a minimalist, bright, and inviting theme with cards separating content; gray backgrounds and shadows establishing hierarchy; and warm gradients and colors guiding the focus.
I always foster a culture of going the extra step. An intuitive, usable product is the baseline; delighting users to keep them coming back is the endgame.
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.
Not a Solo Job
Company Lockstep
Keeping a pulse on a wide target audience and how they interact with a diverse product portfolio, requires tight, cross-department coordination. This is not a “nice-to-have”; it’s "sine qua non".
FIELD TEAMS
Crucial for identifying regional nuances 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.
Flexible Prototyping
A digital product only truly breathes in pixels.
That’s why prototyping becomes the backbone of my process when it comes to fast validation of ideas, be it tailored experiences in Figma or quick, vibe-coded AI exploration projects.
Beta Testing
Features go through beta testing on staging environments or via TestFlight and Firebase before release. Having a steady pool of testers always available multiplies the ability to identify blind spots.
Staggered Releases
Major releases are first rolled out to a portion of users, which contains any critical issues and gives the team a buffer to fix problems.
We applied this approach to the Waste Management service: smaller, newly partnered municipalities were migrated first, allowing us to monitor 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.
ENTERPRISE PACKAGE
Full municipal digitalization package with both the social features 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.
