Written by Fang, 2022 Cohort
B2B is an abbreviation for “business to business”, which means the exchange of products, services or information between businesses, rather than between businesses and consumers (B2C). Namely, B2B products are used to solve business needs. Nowadays, there are many types of B2B digital products such as EPR (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems, OA(Office Automation) systems and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems. Oracle, SAP, Trello, Salesforce are good examples for B2B products.
As we can see, the target users of B2B products are the employees from enterprises, which are quite different from B2C products, whose users are individual consumers like you and me. Hence, the B2B products enjoy some unique traits and I will share some in the following passage from my previous working experience.
1.High business complexity
I remembered I spent one week understanding the business of a customer side product and then I could start my design job with sufficient background knowledge. However, when I first came into contact with the business side of products, I was overwhelmed by the complexity. One month passed and I still felt that the current understanding was not enough to support the design.
2.Many user roles
For most of the customer side products, there are only two user roles. One is the guest, that is, a user who has not yet registered and logged in, and the other is the user. Although some companies will divide their users into several groups, they are essentially the same type of users. However, the user roles of the business side products are divided according to their permissions. Employees have different functional rights because they need to deal with different businesses. There are super administrators, general administrators, operation personnel, financial personnel and other roles inside one company, not to mention other external suppliers, dealers, store staff, etc.
3. High stability requirements
The stability of the business side of the product is of vital importance. Stability weighs more than the charming appearance and the fancy animation. This is because if the system fails, the consequences are usually severe. The bigger the business, the bigger the losses. If the system is unstable, it will make customers lose confidence in the product, resulting in lower renewal rates and even irreversible reputation loss in the industry.