Designing, developing and delivering internal products from scratch can be challenging for several reasons. Your team might receive too many requirements from stakeholders, and you’d need to consider how to build a user-friendly product and deliver on a business goal or your users might be scattered globally having different processes and tools in place that manifests in different user needs and user journeys. If you are designing, developing or responsible for the success of a new enterprise product, here are 9 practical tips to navigate the challenges this may bring.

Tip 1: Start with the basics — consider your users.

First of all, figure out who your users are. Sometimes, a user and a stakeholder is the same person, sometimes your stakeholders manage your users and sometimes your users are the real customers of your company. If your user and a stakeholder is the same person, feel free to set up usability testing sessions with them, as well as workshops, for collecting business requirements. If your stakeholders manage your users, you might receive a list of business requirements from them and uncover unexpected challenges from users conducting user research activities. The needs of senior stakeholders (who potentially fund the project) and managers might be very different from the needs of users who will work with the tool on a daily basis. To be able to ship a tool that satisfies the needs of both groups and delivers a certain business outcome, it is crucial to walk your stakeholders through the summary of insights and prepare your proposed solutions to issues that have been raised by users. Building a great digital product alone might not solve all the problems, and keeping unanimous understanding of business process and business jargon among users aligned with the user experience of the product is essential for the success of the initiative, your team and your company.

You need to know if you are building a product for 5, 20 or 100 people and whether your users are located in the same building with you or they are scattered globally. Knowing how many users you’ve got gives a better ability to decide what feedback to take on board. If you only have 5 users, getting similar comments from 3 people is ample. But if you get similar feedback from 3 people and you’ve collected feedback from 100 users, that makes it a less valid case when trying to get your product prioritised. Another aspect that will be affected by the amount of users is creating ‘personas’. A persona, from user research perspective, is a created character that represents an audience segment and is based on the motivations, habits and preferences of the real users. If your product is mature, the personas should be based on various types of qualitative and quantitative research. Personas help teams to better understand who they are building products for. It is more likely that a product used by 5 people will have only one persona but if you’ve got 100 users, you are more likely to have at least 3 personas. Working with remote teams might bring additional challenges for usability testing sessions and quality of the feedback. If you are showing a prototype to someone who is based on another continent, ask them to share the screen with you first and then send the link to the prototype. Kindly explain that you need to see where your participant clicks as it will give you an insight you are looking for.

It goes without saying that internal products should follow the minimum accessibility standards but you need to find out if your users have any particular type of disability and adjust accordingly. One of the conditions that will affect designs of your tools is colour blindness. The Colour Blind Awareness organisation sheds light on the numbers: colour blindness affects approximately 1 in 12 men (8%) and 1 in 200 women (0.05%) in the world.

You can use Stark plugin for Sketch or Chrome extension A11Y — Color blindness empathy test to better understand how your designs will work for different conditions of colour blindness. Although these tools might not emulate conditions with the accuracy of 100%, they will give you a good idea what works and what doesn’t.