UX in B2B platforms. How to improve the quality of shopping for a business customer?

However, changes are slowly being seen in this area, B2B platforms are increasingly beginning to come forward for help.

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So far, the business user has been treated quite strongly after the stepfather. This may be due to several of the following reasons:

• The decision maker is not a user of the platform — the director chooses the platform that the company will use, while it is the specialists who use it in their daily work. An example would be e-commerce for ordering car parts, or interfaces for booking business trips.
• low user expectations huge systems — users are used to working on such systems, they know that they have a poor user experience. Therefore, they do not even try to report any errors or demand changes. Examples include Salesforce or SAP — large systems used by large companies that are difficult to use.
• lack of alternatives — if there is no competition offering a better user experience, then we use a poor service, because our goal is to accomplish the task entrusted to us, no matter how we have to do it. An example is our e-commerce project for the Airport. It is an online system that allows you to purchase admission to business lounges or fast track. You can skip the queue in two ways - earn miles in one of the affiliate programs or buy such a service online. Most often, the online purchase of such a service will be made by a person from the office. Such a person has no alternative, and no matter how this process will look, he will make an attempt to purchase.

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How to conduct research with B2B users?

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Among the studies, we distinguish:

• Quantitative research — which answers the question: how? what?
• Qualitative research — which answers the question: why?

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The choice of method in this case does not differ significantly from those for B2C.

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The challenges that can be encountered here are:

• Volume It is difficult to collect valuable quantitative data if we have few customers.
• Recruitment — using a recruitment agency misses the point. It is best to recruit from a database of current users to whom we as designers do not have access. That is why we end up asking colleagues or colleagues from other departments to contact people with whom we could talk. Unfortunately, this is not a priority for them, which translates into a lengthening of this process.
• Selection of respondents — in research it is worth paying attention to the role that a person plays in the process. Referring to the above example, we already know that the ordering person will not always use the product on a daily basis, therefore if we do not examine all the needs or processes, our UX will be incomplete.

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B2B customers — how do they buy? Is there a common denominator, no matter the industry?

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We don't have too many publications on how B2B customers buy to pinpoint that. Companies buy very different products and services online. In addition, it may happen that such a process is longer, due to internal company processes.

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Let's look at an example that most of us can relate to. Each of us probably got some kind of corporate gadget at some point. Now imagine a person in marketing who had to place such an order, for example, for 2,000 pens with a company logo. This is not a very complicated purchase and it does not have too much impact on the entire company.

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Now let's imagine that the same company is trying to buy an online server service, or hosting, licenses for employees. Such a purchase affects the functioning of the company as a whole.

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Both of the above purchases are B2B purchases, but they will certainly take place quite differently than for individual customers.

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What about the mobile-first approach? In the case of B2B, can we even consider such a direction?

Looking at the generally available B2B data, desktop is still more popular. However, it is worth breaking this data down into smaller parts and looking at them more closely. An example could be website of our agency, where most of the traffic comes from mobile. Of course, this is not an e-commerce site where customers can make purchases, but it is still a B2B site.

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Startups that we work for and that offer SaaS products also watch movements on their websites. According to their data, roughly half of the traffic comes from desktop devices and half from mobile.

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Unfortunately, this is still too small a sample to draw conclusions. When looking at the data contained in the summary reports, one must realize that they may not show the whole truth.

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Websites and errors during UX audits

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In the case of B2B, let's distinguish two points:

• image, related to the product
• those on the purchase path

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As for the image issue, the pages often lack information on what exactly the company does. You have to spend far too much time on this. This is a problem to be solved at the communication level.

In addition, it is also a problem that no one regularly checks the website for the correctness of the links, which leads to the formation of dead ends. In B2B e-commerce we also find a lot of configurators, where there are also errors that could be easily simplified.

Regardless of whether we are talking about B2B or B2C, the error that arises is communication. What is missing here is clear and adequate communication that will guide the user. There may be a situation where the user path is correct, while the content on the interface is misleading.

Purchase path. Here, too, bugs creep in. Among them, we can distinguish the following:

• Errors in navigation, poorly named sections that do not suggest what is inside,
• A search engine that takes up the entire page,
• Completely invisible call to action, pressed somewhere on the banner,
• Elements that look clickable and are not clickable and vice versa.
  
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Where to look for innovation?

Krzysztof Folta in his podcast said that Innovation should not be sought in your industryand in other industries. How does this relate to UX design in B2B e-commerce?

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In fact, looking exclusively at the competition or our own market, we limit ourselves to the level of the most innovative companies, building ourselves the ceiling of our development. Instead of developing self-service for contractors, we could improve our sales processes. It's ok, but it's not innovative.

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Where to look for innovation?

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A good approach may be to look for real problems. Such things that annoy users and respond to them with innovation. It will not always work as we expect it to — with the birth of a great innovation, but it may lead us to develop the existing service, or change its character.

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Sometimes it's about curiosity about the activities of other industries. Surely if we thought only about problems, man would never set foot on the moon.

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Therefore, it is best to take inspiration from other industries and draw from them. Take, for example, such a culinary workshop where we cook by observing how the chef works, as he shows the next steps to follow. During such workshops, we repeatedly, ineptly follow the boss, who is an expert and has done it many times before.

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Then we realize again that doing something once does not make us experts in the field at all. It is necessary to practice, to push the limit, to repeat until we learn. This applies to any industry — be it cooking, designing or selling online.