The Evolving Design of "B2B Companies"

This article presents content originally published in Design Mind, a design journal operated by frog, under the supervision of Mr. Noriaki Okada of Dentsu BX Creative Center.

We introduce design as a means to enhance productivity, safety, and employee engagement—information we want CxOs (Chief x Officers) in industrial and manufacturing sectors to know.

When thinking of design-focused companies, many might picture consumer-facing businesses like high-tech, retail, financial services (and perhaps automotive). The design industry itself has reinforced this image by celebrating consumer gadgets and digital products from famous brands.

However, the reality is that much of design work has shifted to the B2B (Business-to-Business) sector. Some of the most fascinating and challenging design work emerging over the past decade has been created for and within the industrial, manufacturing, and technology industries.

As a global strategy and design firm, frog has been at the forefront of this trend, which could be called the "B2B design revolution." Today, approximately half of frog's work involves B2B projects. Our designers, technologists, and strategists have tackled the design of everything from mining safety products to global logistics systems and IT security equipment.

Addressing Big Data

While consumer IoT may have largely failed, the environment where things are connected to the internet has fundamentally changed how companies understand their production processes and how their products are actually used.

By equipping factories, oil fields, power plants, aircraft engines, ships, trucks, and various other machines with sensors, companies can now collect vast amounts of data and use it for monitoring, managing, maintaining, and controlling equipment. However, the critical part is understanding what it all means.

When dealing with vast amounts of data, many people intuitively think to follow established IT industry practices and start by displaying everything on dashboards. However, in our experience, this approach not only places a heavy burden on operators but also tends to result in creating large volumes of data snapshots that are interesting but not useful.

Instead, building data visualizations that reduce operators' cognitive load and enable rapid decision-making is far more effective. In several frog programs, we use "speed to decision" as a key metric for optimization when designing management tools for sophisticated B2B enterprises.

Safety and productivity over visual appeal

Digital tools created by designers may indeed have stylish designs. However, investment in design within industry and manufacturing is not driven by the pursuit of beauty, but rather to enhance employee productivity and ensure everyone's safety.

We've discovered that the mindset and methodologies used in designing consumer products can also be applied to improve the safety and productivity of physical digital processes and workflows in industrial settings.

For example, we were responsible for designing safety devices and control systems for manufacturing in one project. Design flaws could lead to catastrophic consequences. Therefore, we needed to design tools and software where the next step is always clearly understood, even during emergencies and high-pressure situations. The 2018 false missile alert in Hawaii and the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident are said to have been caused, in part, by software design flaws.

Furthermore, in many industrial production settings, employee roles tend to be fluid. This situation further complicates design in industrial and manufacturing contexts.

For example, when a frog team conducted ethnographic research at a power plant, they discovered that when the system emergency-stopped, all workers collaborated to solve the problem, making job titles and roles largely irrelevant. This contrasts sharply with consumer goods manufacturers or office-based companies, where roles like managers and general users are clearly defined, and software is developed accordingly. When designing industrial software, the design team must thoroughly understand the client company's workflow. Rather than tailoring the design to specific user roles, it is necessary to design by anticipating various scenarios.

※1 Ethnographic Research
Research that uses methods such as depth interviews, observational studies, and fieldwork to uncover users' latent needs.

The Need for Design That Satisfies Both Baby Boomers and Millennials

Many companies in the industrial and manufacturing sectors are facing an aging workforce. Veteran employees possess extensive knowledge of specific equipment, plants, and systems, making them valuable assets companies wish to retain as long as possible. Simultaneously, these companies also employ digital native generations. They expect industrial and enterprise software to look, feel, and behave like top-tier consumer applications. This creates a challenging design conflict of interest.

As one example of how to address this problem, let's look at a project frog worked on with a technology equipment manufacturer.

The technology this manufacturer possessed was highly profitable but quite outdated. By today's standards, its command-line interface (CLI) accessed via console was far from optimal. New users were put off by the tool's dated look and feel, demanding a visual interface console or mobile app.

Conversely, power users who had been using the system for years were accustomed to this interface and highly proficient with it, making most of them resistant to change. Our design challenge was to create a system that felt familiar and comfortable for power users while also being accessible and appealing to new users.

This is a common challenge in the Operational Technology (OT) field. This is because, while products in the IT field typically have a lifespan of 3 to 5 years, many products in the OT field have a much longer lifespan of 15 to 20 years.

Design Systems: Bridging Operations and Design

The first step for industrial and manufacturing companies seeking to compete through design is establishing a design language. A design language embeds design principles, aesthetic sensibilities, interaction patterns, and design assets into the system. It is created to ensure consistency across diverse and complex product ecosystems. Typically, a design language includes support in the form of a user interface toolkit that embodies these principles and patterns, making it easy for engineering teams involved in product development and launch to use.

While these tools help product teams get a head start on commercialization, they inevitably fall short in delivering long-term value. Platforms and design languages go in and out of fashion, and heavy reliance on specific vendor technologies—known as "vendor lock-in"—can bind companies to product schedules they cannot control.

Drawing from our experience designing and building numerous design languages, we recognized that these systems often lack resilience and strong integration with development and other phases. Consequently, we explored ways to embed design into each company's operations while considering the long-term needs of industrial and manufacturing enterprises.

For companies seeking a more flexible, long-term approach to design investment, the solution lies not in design languages, but in design systems. A design system integrates various tools, components, and workflows, proactively connecting business challenges with the design process.

Design systems function as the single source of truth for product design, supporting workflows with modular tools that directly integrate design into the product development cycle. Most design systems comprise design tools, design language, UX architecture and systems, UI toolkits, governance models enabling controlled workload management, and task management tools for executing workload adjustments daily.

Crucially, the human element is decisive: how to encourage, motivate, and persuade each product team to use the design system. Just as a carrot is more effective than a stick for getting a horse to run, we've seen design-oriented engineers and product managers form communities centered around design systems at some industrial product manufacturers.

Design systems, through their modularity and continuous measurement and improvement, enable changes as needed without being locked into specific platform vendors.
Once adopted, a design system delivers a cohesive product portfolio, reduces user training costs through consistent patterns, and enables a branded, unique user experience.

Design plays an extremely important role in helping companies in the industrial, manufacturing, and technology sectors enhance their competitiveness. As machines and systems become more sophisticated and IoT generates data flows operators cannot process, software designed with these factors in mind not only improves operator safety and productivity but also helps achieve competitive differentiation.

It's no exaggeration to say that every company is now a software maker. This means adopting the latest software design and development methodologies is essential to maintaining competitiveness. Through collaborations with our B2B clients, frog has identified highly interesting data visualization and software design challenges. We welcome the opportunity to apply our skills and experience across broader domains through work with clients in the industrial and manufacturing sectors.

This article is also published in the web magazine "AXIS".