Designing for B2C vs B2B
an Insight

When it comes to B2C products, the users are usually individuals, approaching your product with a specific goal in mind. Since the product is released for everyone, we can’t really control who will interact with the product in what technical capacity. For example, a few people who did not know who Oppenheimer was, found the latest Nolan movie extremely boring! The focus of the product is to make a first impression so great that the users will keep returning to our products whenever the same goal needs to be achieved. 

On the other hand, for B2B products, the users are generally businesses. There are multiple users dealing with different processes within the organization and all of them have their specific work chalked out for them. The users come with the knowledge of industry terms and workflows and hence, it is important to match the product to their mental model rather than making a lasting first impression

For B2C products, the goal is mostly to increase the usage of the product offering. The simplest way to measure would be MAUs or Monthly active users. The product may focus on the users’ emotions to keep them hooked or create advertisements to draw them to products.

On the other hand, the aim of the B2B product is to improve process efficiency of a business process. The metric for that could be number of man-hours saved or percent reduction in errors, depending upon what the designer is solving for. 

When it comes to B2C products, the idea is to provide the best possible experience to the users, thereby limiting the primary actions per page to one. The focus should be on the ease of use with recognition. The users should be able to perform the primary goal with minimal mental effort

When it comes to B2B products, there comes a need when the user may have to perform a lot of actions on a single page. This makes things complicated if you still try to achieve the one primary action per page philosophy. However, care must be taken to allow users to perform all the tasks they want to via recognition rather than recall. 

When it comes to B2C products, personalisation is the key to increase the sales. Personalized content makes the users more attached to the product and hence increases their chances of returning. However, these personalisations are limited to the set boundary defined by the development team. These boundaries are extremely agile and need to be moved and adjusted as the industry standard changes. 

When it comes to B2B products, the products have a longer development cycle and hence the products can be made extremely customized for the target organizations. However, the personalisation is done for the roles and businesses not for the individuals working in the organization. In the industry this is called ‘white labeling’