December 11, 2025
|
Web Design
AI
UX
UI
6 min read
Designing for Enterprise Confidence
Earning enterprise credibility after being laughed out of sales rooms.
6 Weeks
1 Designer
About
SureCost is the leading purchasing platform for pharmacies, processing millions in pharmaceutical transactions annually. For over ten years, we've helped customers save money through optimized procurement, rebate tracking, and vendor contract management. We turn purchasing decisions into a competitive advantage.
Working closely with the Director of Product Management and CPO, I helped lead the strategic vision for enterprise expansion. Translating customer pain points into a product strategy that secured leadership buy-in for future investment.
The Problem
We overwhelmed users with data instead of curating what mattered, costing enterprise deals.
I had had proven we could modernize our interface. But when sales took our product into enterprise demos, we were getting laughed out of rooms.
Months
of onboarding
2000+
Pages
5+ Clicks
to complete any task
We didn't look like we belonged at the enterprise table. The same story kept coming up in business updates and team meetings. I realized incremental fixes weren't going to solve this as quickly as we needed them to. I needed to step back and reimagine what SureCost could be if we designed specifically for enterprise from the start.
The Solution
Role-based dashboards surfacing the right information for each user persona.
The breakthrough was realizing that I could ask users their role at onboarding and serve them a customized home page, one they'd actually look forward to using every day. I designed scalable system patterns to help ensure we could adapt to any workflow.
Responsive Design & Power Users
Data showed that 30% of current users owned monitors with dimensions less than 1200px. Screen real estate was a key point of data I needed to keep an eye on. Keyboard shortcuts for power users were also a consideration. Anticipating that enterprise users would value speed over mouse-driven interactions.
Helping Focus
User interviews revealed pop-up fatigue was disrupting pharmacist workflows. I designed a Do Not Disturb mode that removes non-critical alerts, surfacing only essential information so users can focus on completing tasks.
Flexible Views
Multi-site managers were doing a lot of unnecessary work. They had to drill down to see details, climb back up to compare across sites, and manually track discrepancies. They were missing alerts because the system wasn't helping them. Flexible views let them slice the data however they need: an entire region, specific pharmacies, multiple regions at once, even a single department across sites. Select from the dropdown or click in the chart, and the whole page responds instantly.
Stakeholder Feedback
One large hurdle I had to overcome in our last re-design was internal stakeholder buy-in. To help create a sense of ownership and excitement, I conducted multiple feedback sessions across all our departments and the executive team. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive:
"This looks like something I think we can all hold our heads up and say, 'Hey, this is a great application that feels ready for the modern world.'"
"So this is perfect. Like in my brain, my linear brain's brain, this is exactly what I would want to see."
Challenges
The primary challenge was access. We were pivoting from our typical "mom and pop" customer base to enterprise users, which meant I needed to find the right people to interview. The second challenge was capacity. This work needed to happen proactively, in anticipation of enterprise client requests, while I continued leading other product initiatives. I approached it strategically, conducting interviews and synthesizing insights incrementally as bandwidth allowed, ensuring the research was thorough despite the constraints.
Retrospective
Creating a brand new, distinct SureCost and dreaming what the application could be with UX at the core reconnected me to why I do this work: to create something meaningful.
I showcased the prototype at our SureCost Insights conference. The excitement was overwhelming. People saw how much time the restructuring could save and wanted to know when it would launch. That validation made me ready to keep building.
While this project hasn't moved to development, I'd like to track these metrics to validate the design decisions:
Sales effectiveness: Are the role-based dashboards moving prospects through the sales funnel faster, or are enterprise deals still stalling at the demo stage? If we're not seeing improved conversion, the design didn't restore credibility.
Feature discoverability: Are users finding and using the key features designed for their role without training or support tickets? High organic adoption would prove the interface is intuitive, not just visually appealing.
Task completion efficiency: Are users completing critical workflows faster than with the old interface? Higher completion rates would validate the design reduced the "5+ clicks to complete any task" problem.
Moving forward, I'd explore progressive disclosure patterns to ensure we aren't just hiding complexity but truly simplifying workflows.
The biggest lesson was that sometimes it takes stepping back from what you've created, giving it an honest critique, and building something more beautiful because of it.