On B2B applications and internal tools – the two kinds of software whose users can't walk away. And why that isn't a licence, it's an open flank.
The short version: Bad B2B software doesn't survive because it's good enough. It survives because its users are paid to endure it. The same goes for internal tools. The usual benchmark — "that's decent for B2B" — isn't a standard, it's proof that everyone is sitting in the same basement. Comfortable, until somebody stands up. And in Germany, incidentally, ergonomic workplace software isn't a matter of taste. It's occupational safety law.
There's a sentence I hear regularly in projects, usually from someone with budget authority, usually with a faintly apologetic smile:
"Well, it's B2B."
Meaning: it doesn't have to be beautiful here. It doesn't have to be fast. People can learn it. Different standards apply.
True, actually. Different standards do apply. Just not the ones you mean.
In consumer products, the user decides. Bad app, app gone. In B2B, procurement decides and the user gets assigned the outcome. They can't cancel, can't switch, can't even complain without sounding like they're refusing to work. They can do exactly one thing: put up with it. And at the end of the month, they get paid for that.
That's the actual business foundation of a lot of B2B products. Not quality. Compensation for pain.
Exactly the same applies to the second kind of software with no exit: the kind you build yourself. The back office for case handling. The admin panel. The reporting tool. The internal booking system that's been running "temporarily" since 2014. Bought or built is a technical distinction and economically the same case: users with no exit.
And software whose users can't leave doesn't get honest feedback. It gets acclimatisation. Those are entirely different things, though they're easily confused in a status meeting.
1. Why "The B2B Benchmark" Is the Laziest Excuse in the Industry
The reflex, when you criticise a B2B interface, is always the same: compare us to the competition and we don't look bad at all.
Except the competition isn't your benchmark. The competition is in the same basement you are.
If every vendor in a sector has been building the same overloaded screens for fifteen years, the sector average isn't a quality level. It's a collective alibi. "Better than SAP" is about as ambitious as "faster than the post office."
The real benchmark sits somewhere else. Your users aren't only case handlers, dispatchers or buyers. In the evening they're also people who book a train ticket in four seconds, transfer money in two taps and start a film in zero. They don't switch that experience off at nine in the morning. They sit in front of your screen knowing perfectly well that it can be done differently. Consumerization of IT is what the trade press has called it for fifteen years, and it describes nothing more than the expectations your users bring in every morning and have to check at your login screen.
"That's good for B2B" means, in practice: we have successfully trained our users to expect less. That isn't a position. That's a condition.
And the thing about a low bar is that it's very easy to clear.
2. The Calculation Nobody Runs
For customer-facing products, everyone runs the numbers. Conversion, cost per order, cart abandonment. For internal software, nobody does — even though the calculation is far simpler here, because the users are on your payroll.
A few numbers for scale:
Harvard Business Review, working with researchers, observed twenty teams across three Fortune 500 companies over five weeks. Result: people switched between applications and windows roughly 1,200 times a day. The pure reorientation cost added up to around four hours a week — about nine percent of annual working time. The piece at HBR.
Qatalog and Cornell University's Ellis Idea Lab found in their survey that it takes 9.5 minutes to get productive again after a tool switch — and that nearly an hour of every working day goes on hunting for information across systems. Summary at CIO Dive.
Asana's Anatomy of Work adds another layer: around 60 percent of working time goes on "work about work" — chasing status, assembling information, jumping between tools. That leaves 40 percent for the work people were actually hired to do.
Now run it roughly for your own organisation:
200 employees. Each loses 15 minutes a day to a badly designed core application — conservative, measured against the numbers above. That's 50 hours a day across the company. At 220 working days: 11,000 hours. At €60 fully loaded per hour: €660,000 a year.
Every year. Again. Without ever appearing in a presentation, because lost time doesn't have a cost centre.
Against that stands a UX project that costs you — depending on scope — a low five-figure sum, and whose effect you can actually measure: handling time per case, error rate, number of second-level support queries, onboarding time for new staff.
This is, incidentally, the most convenient business case in our field. It needs no market research. You already have all the data in-house — you've just never shown it to anyone who could do something with it.
3. Internal Tools: A Blind Spot With a System Behind It
Why does the internal application look like 2009 while the campaign site for the same product is in the awards annual?
Because internal software belongs to nobody whose bonus depends on it.
External products have a product owner, a marketing budget, KPIs and a board watching the numbers. Internal tools have a functional specification. Requirements come from the department, implementation from IT, design from nobody. There's no conversion, so there's no discussion. There are only tickets.
The typical symptoms — and I'd bet you recognise at least three:
- A screen with 60 fields, because it was "carried over from the legacy system."
- Error messages that give you a number and nothing else.
- Terminology straight out of the data model in the interface, because it was easier to name the field after the column.
- A spreadsheet maintained in parallel to the official system, because the official system doesn't reflect how the work is actually done.
- Training that exists only because the interface doesn't explain itself. Training is expensively purchased compensation for design work that was never done.
- New colleagues who still have to ask after two weeks.
That last point is the costliest and never gets attributed. If your onboarding takes six weeks because the application is illogical, you pay those six weeks on every single hire, forever, and more often as turnover rises. That isn't an HR question. That's a design flaw on subscription.
Then there's the system's silent resignation: shadow IT. When people start organising their work in private spreadsheets, WhatsApp groups and self-built tools, that isn't a discipline problem. That's a usability report. It just reaches you filed as a compliance breach.
4. A Short Legal Section, Because It Comes Up Too Rarely
If the productivity maths doesn't land: in Germany, ergonomic workplace software isn't a friendly gesture. It's an employer obligation.
The Workplace Ordinance (Arbeitsstättenverordnung) states in its annex, section 6, that when operating display screen workstations the employer must ensure the workstation is designed appropriately for the task — and that suitable software systems must be provided. It goes on to require, among other things, that software be adaptable to the knowledge and experience of employees, that it provide information about the respective dialogue steps, and that it describe errors and allow them to be corrected with limited effort. Legal text at gesetze-im-internet.de.
Read that last clause again. "Correction with limited effort." That is, at its core, a design requirement, and it has been in the law for decades — originally in the Display Screen Equipment Ordinance, since 2016 in the Workplace Ordinance.
It's given substance by ISO 9241-110, the interaction principles for dialogue systems — in the 2020 revision: suitability for the user's tasks, self-descriptiveness, conformity with user expectations, learnability, controllability, robustness against user error, and user engagement. That isn't designer poetry, that's a standard works councils and labour inspectorates can point to.
On top of that comes the risk assessment required by section 5 of the German Occupational Safety Act, which explicitly covers the design of work processes and psychological strain at work. An application that makes people fight it for eight hours a day falls squarely into that category — it just never shows up there, because nobody thinks to treat software as a work tool. It is one.
5. The Open Flank: One Competitor Trying Is Enough
Now the part that matters to vendors rather than users.
If you sell B2B software, you probably see the low bar as an advantage. It isn't. It's an unguarded gate.
Market logic has shifted. B2B purchasing decisions haven't been made by procurement alone for a long time: a typical buying group is put at six to ten people depending on the survey — and end users now sit at the table. Their criterion is always the same: is it usable? In G2's buyer behaviour research, ease of implementation, speed to ROI and ease of use sit at the top of the decision list. And here's the sentence that should actually interest you: only around 45 percent of software buyers renew without further thought — more than half actively evaluate alternatives at renewal. G2 Software Buyer Behavior.
Every renewal is therefore a small pitch, and you lose it to whoever can do the same thing while being easier to use. And because your users have been banking their frustration for years, that competitor doesn't need stamina. They need a trial account and a demo that works in the meeting.
Then there's public reviews. The days when user opinion stayed inside the company are over — it's on review platforms now, and buyers read them. Your users can't cancel on you. But they can rate you. These days that's nearly the same thing.
And for the other side, the internal one: McKinsey studied 300 publicly listed companies over five years for The Business Value of Design. Firms in the top quartile of the design index showed 32 percentage points more revenue growth and 56 percentage points more growth in shareholder returns than their peers. More interesting than the number is the distribution: there was barely any difference between the second, third and fourth quartiles. The market doesn't reward mediocrity with a bit of design on top. It rewards standing out clearly. The study.
Translated: being slightly less ugly buys you nothing. The jump only pays once it's noticeable.
6. What You Can Do Without Declaring a Transformation Programme
I'm no fan of twelve-month roadmaps for problems you can start on in four weeks. So, concretely:
1. Sit next to people. Not interviews, not surveys. Sit down and watch someone process a real case. Two days. You'll see things that appear in no ticket — sticky notes beside the keyboard, parallel spreadsheet universes, memorised click paths. It's the most honest requirements analysis there is, and it costs almost nothing.
2. Measure the top five tasks. What does the team do most often? How long does it take, how often does it go wrong? Prioritise on that. Not by volume of complaints, but by frequency times duration. The 30-second task that runs 400 times a day beats any feature at the top of the specification.
3. Take fields out. Same exercise as with customer-facing forms, only with heavier legacy. For each field: who needs this, what for, what happens without it? And no, "it's always been there" is not an answer.
4. Set smart defaults. The most common value is preselected. The current case handler is preselected. Today's date is preselected. Sounds trivial, saves seconds per case and weeks per year.
5. Give it an owner. Internal tools don't fail on capability, they fail on accountability. As long as nobody has the authority to take a field away from a department, nothing happens.
6. Make the number visible. Handling time per case, before and after. Exactly one slide. That slide decides whether there's budget next time.
Why You Can Take My Word for It
I'm Tobias Adam, a freelance UX designer in Hamburg, more than ten years in digital product development.
I learned the craft agency-side, including at Jung von Matt and deepblue networks — where ambition, enterprise reality and deadline all land on the table at once. I've worked for BMW, Audi, FIFA, Union Investment, Vodafone, OBI and Deutsche Messe, among others. Over 20 awards, including Webby, ADC and Cannes.
The awards came for the visible work. I learned the most from the invisible kind: application flows, onboardings, internal systems, signups. The VisualVest account opening in the Union Investment orbit, for instance, where regulatory disclosure requirements and a usable flow had to work at the same time. Or a digital future planner, so far unpublished, where the question was how much a system may take off the user's hands before it becomes paternalistic.
Those are the projects that win no awards and still decide whether a company works efficiently or not.
Today I work freelance and together with HC Merkle as intro.team — two freelancers for the phase where an idea becomes a testable product: concept, UX, UI, prototype, user testing. Short cycles, senior staffing, no agency apparatus.
The Short Version
- Software with no exit gets acclimatisation, not feedback. Don't mistake that for satisfaction.
- "That's good for B2B" is not a benchmark. Your users compare you to what they use in the evening.
- Internal tools are the same case as bought software. Users who can't switch.
- Do the maths on lost time. 15 minutes a day times headcount times loaded cost. That number is your funding request.
- Training is paid compensation for missing design. So are second-level tickets.
- Shadow IT is a usability report, not a compliance problem.
- Workplace software ergonomics is occupational safety law, not taste.
- The low bar isn't protection, it's an invitation. More than half your customers evaluate alternatives at renewal.
- Half-measures don't pay. The market rewards those who clearly stand out.
- Start with the five most frequent tasks. Not with the roadmap.
Software whose users can't walk away isn't a safe market. It's a market nobody has attacked yet.
Part one of this series looked at forms, field count and smart defaults — the same question, applied to users who very much can walk away.