Designing for B2B is No Different From Designing for B2C

Recently, UIEtips subscriber Vince wrote:

“It’s nice to see usability research for consumer-oriented sites , but since we focus on a B2B audience (and solely on the IT B2B audience), I’d like to find studies focusing on this group of people.”

I don’t think Vince is going to find what he’s looking for, primarily because, in my opinion, it doesn’t make a difference.

One of the great myths of the web is there is a difference between business-to-consumer (B2C) sites and business-to-business (B2B) sites. But, having looked into this for the last ten years, we can conclusively say you won’t find any difference in how people behave on one site or the other.

This is because, whether interacting with B2C or B2B, it’s still an individual person doing the interacting. And people are people. They don’t change their behaviors when they are doing something work-related than when they are doing something personal.

One difference people frequently tell me is: “A consumer is shopping for themselves, able to make their own decisions, and a business shopper is shopping for the organization and has to get approval. It’s not the same shopping process. So the designs need to be different.”

The underlying assumption of this challenge is there’s only one type of consumer purchasing context and there’s only one type of B2B purchasing context. That’s simply not true. Having spent much of the last few years watching people buy everything online from CDs to digital cameras to pajamas to refrigerators, I can tell you there’s dozen of shopping contexts.

For example, the way someone reorders a 25lb bag of Iams Cat Food online isn’t a whole lot different than the way a buyer reorders 3,000 bolts for their manufacturing line. Both shoppers knows what they want and they just need to specify an item and place the order.

And the way a family researches which new car to buy isn’t particularly different than the way an IT manager might choose an enterprise database solution. They both need to the designs to give them the information to inform themselves and to inform the others who might be involved in the approval process.

But, buying cat food is very different than researching a car purchase. And reordering bolts is very different than researching database technology.

True, someone who has no authority in a business has to then ask permission (thereby needing support materials to persuade the decision maker to choose the right thing), but not everyone in business is in that context. I recently read that more than 80% of businesses in the US have 15 employees or less. The owner/operators of those 80% of all businesses don’t need to ask permission. (And I’ve seen marriage relationships where the supposed “head of household” had to ask permission for everything.) So, while you can divide buyers up by whether they need approval from another party or not, it doesn’t divide up on B2C/B2B lines.

There are a ton of ways to divide and separate out users’ behaviors when interacting with the web, thereby requiring us to create designs to meet those individual needs. However, in our work, we haven’t seen any evidence that B2C and B2B is a line worth drawing. To us, it’s a meaningless distinction that really only serves to distract the design team.