• DESIGN FOR FOUNDERS · 04
Why your B2B product feels harder to use than the apps your customers use at home
Abhinav Dhankar · 3 min read
For eight years at Microsoft I made product demo videos for Power Platform and Dynamics 365, explaining features that were already built. To explain a feature, I had to use it first, the way a new user would. And one pattern kept catching my eye. The apps on my phone felt smooth and obvious. The business software I worked with every day was powerful, but heavy.
At first I thought it was visual polish. Better colours, nicer icons, more white space. Over time I realized the gap runs much deeper, and most of it has nothing to do with how the screen looks.
The person who buys it is not the person who uses it
If a food delivery app annoys you, you delete it and order from another one tonight. That fear keeps consumer apps honest.
B2B software is bought by a manager after a demo and a feature comparison. It is used by someone else, eight hours a day, who had no say in the decision and can't leave. So the product slowly gets shaped for the person in the demo, not the person at the desk. More features win the deal. Nobody in that meeting asks how the order entry screen feels at 6 pm on a Friday.
Consumer apps compete for attention every day. B2B products compete for the renewal once a year. Your users live with the difference.
Every big customer leaves a setting behind
The biggest client asked for an extra field, so it became a setting. Another needed a different approval step, so that became a toggle. Each request made sense on its own. Five years later, a new user opens the settings page and sees forty options, thirty-eight of which have nothing to do with her.
Add to that several roles sharing the same screens, an admin, a manager and an operator all looking at one dashboard built for none of them, and real data that is never as clean as the sample data in the demo.
The problem is complex. The product doesn't have to be.
This is the part founders often accept too easily. Yes, your customers' problems are complex. But how much of that complexity reaches the user on any given screen is a decision. Somebody decides what the operator sees first, what stays hidden until it's needed, and which of those forty settings matter on day one.
When nobody makes that decision on purpose, the product makes it by default, and the default is: show everything to everyone.
• TRY THIS ON YOUR OWN PRODUCT THIS WEEK
Write down every role that uses your product. Next to each, write the one task that role does most often. Then log in as each role and look at the first screen. Count how many things on it have nothing to do with that task.
That count is the complexity your user is carrying for you. You don't need a redesign to start reducing it. You need to decide, role by role, what can wait.
A complex problem doesn't have to become a complex product. Somebody just has to decide how much of it the user carries.