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How Can We Transform an Enterprise Product with Intuitive User Experience?

Dani Liu

June 8, 2023

When it comes to user experience, what is your impression of a B2B product versus a B2C product? Complex versus simple? Versatile versus universal? Professional versus playful? I can go on, but the point is, why are they so different?

Most people would say that the B2B user experience focuses on delivering in-depth content and adaptability, while the B2C user experience focuses on ease of use and emotional connections with the customers. There are many factors that contribute to such a split in prioritization, but I believe the most impactful reason is that the decision makers and active users are the same for B2C products but can be very different for B2B products. Unsurprisingly, there is a higher level of tolerance from B2B product users for poor user experience, and they will often make do with the tool that gives them the most value for the business even when using the tool feels highly unsatisfying.

With more people reflecting on how they like to work, the Data Intelligence team at Rocket Software realized that it was time for us to build something transformational to combine the best of both worlds.

To get started, you might ask – what should a B2B product experience feel like? And how might it compare to its B2C counterparts? Allow me to share a personal memory as an analogy. When I think back to how I would plan a cross-country trip “in the old days,” long before the emergence of mobile apps, I shudder to recall all the painstaking hours spent creating the perfect plan. I am a detail-oriented engineer at heart, so my perfect plan not only included the essentials, like where I was staying and eating each night but also every route optimization that would maximize the value of my trip, such as timing my rest stops to align with visiting a place of interest. It felt quite satisfying to have such a perfect plan until I realized I wrote the wrong address, or I encountered unexpected traffic on the interstate or the people I was traveling with left something a few stops before. The memory of a perfect plan gone awry is why using navigation apps today feels so heavenly. I still plan the essentials before the start of my trip, but once I’m on the go, I feel supremely relaxed knowing that, with a little guidance, my apps can find whatever I need on the way faster than I ever could by myself, and I have the flexibility to change my plan at any time without getting lost.

We want to bring you such a transformational change to data discovery as well. The challenges of data tracing, inventory counting, and context setting can feel just as overwhelming as planning that cross-country trip the old-fashioned way. For example, a simple request to uncover how a data point used in a business report was generated may require access to multiple IT tools, in-depth analysis within each tool, and explanations from various “domain or data experts”. The process is slow, painstakingly manual, and as prone to error as my beautifully balanced itinerary was to unexpected setbacks. By incorporating the design thinking in B2C products into our B2B enterprise platform, we strived to make the consumption of complex information incredibly easy, appealing, and customizable, while preserving the important content and value for the business. And we did exactly that!

With more mainframe, distributed, and cloud technology connections available than any other vendor in the market, our tool is already reducing your risks of finding critical errors and unknowns – detours that would send you scrambling for an answer and would take days, weeks, or even months sometimes to resolve manually. Our transformed user experience around searching, filtering, and lineage browsing will make it even easier and faster for anyone to find the answer to their data questions. We believe that using our tool to discover your data landscape should feel personable, like using modern websites and apps when shopping for real estate. You can easily narrow down your search based on the criteria you care about and choose from a variety of browsing customizations based on preferences for how to see and share data with others. Rocket Data Intelligence provides the intuitiveness and customization you need to discover trusted data, the origins or targets of that data, and any associated business contexts. We bring a data relationship browsing experience built on automation and with easily accessible business and technical information to ensure anyone from your organization can start their data discovery journey from day one, regardless of whether you have legacy, cloud, or hybrid environments.

The key ingredient to success in designing transformational experiences is opening our minds to the users we serve to understand their dreams, goals, tasks, and challenges, so we can help them do their job better and enjoy their work more. Incorporating the user perspective has been so crucial in our product design process thus far, so we want to continue hearing from you all about the good, the bad, and the ugly of your data discovery experiences.

Take a look at the new Rocket Data Intelligence experience to learn more.