Box CEO Aaron Levie Ariel Zambelich / WIRED
In the nine months since Satya Nadella took over as CEO of Microsoft, the company has been getting unprecedented love from Office 365 users and Wall Street alike. Meanwhile, Box CEO Aaron Levie, one of Microsoft’s perennial detractors, has been quiet. But not because he’s been sulking. He was busy looking for Ethan Batraski.
Batraski is Box’s new vice president of design, and according to Levie, finding him was a year-long process. He’s the company’s first design executive, and it’s a critical hire. Batraski, who had a hand in the celebrated redesign of Yahoo’s mail and weather apps a few years back, will oversee Box’s entire product portfolio.
His mandate is to bring new focus to the usability of Box’s apps, looking at the needs of individual users for design insights instead of simply trying to serve organizations in the abstract. It may seem like an obvious approach, but Batraski says it’s largely absent in the enterprise world. “Design hasn’t even been a conversation in enterprise software until now,” he explains. “Enterprise can become a lot more human-focused. The ROI on what we’re doing, in terms of organizational efficiency, is almost incalculable.” Eventually, it could mean a broader mission for Box as a company, one that looks beyond file sharing to collaboration more broadly.
Ethan Bartraski Box
Seams in the Workflow
When Batraski talks about improving efficiency in the enterprise world, he isn’t talking about how apps look but rather how they work. At home, we blithely send files between programs and computers, often directly via open APIs that help different apps communicate. Legacy enterprise programs mostly don’t integrate with one another, so much of the data-moving that drives today’s businesses is done manually. This creates seams in the workflow: points where information can get lost, delayed, mis-typed, stolen or destroyed.
Take a worker in an oil field responsible for inspecting equipment every day. His job starts with a clipboard full of forms. Back in the office, he enters the data into a computer, burns the files onto a CD, and mails it to a home office. That office analyzes the data on the disc, crafts a response plan, burns it onto a CD, and mails it back. Then the field worker acts on it.
As Batraski sees it, each of those steps is a potential seam, and part of his new post is figuring out how to smooth them over. “We’re talking about making something that’s 46 steps into just a few,” he explains.
Redesigning for the Real World
Until now, Box was mostly designing for general use cases: sharing files, collaborating on documents. As part of the new effort, Box designers will be dig into labor-intensive real-world jobs like that of the oil worker, looking for the points of friction and tedium. Then, they’ll try to find solutions that can be incorporated into the design of Box’s applications at large.
For Box, it’s a play at becoming something more like a true platform than infrastructural piping. It could help move Box down the value chain, closer to the end user. The trouble will be figuring out how to translate specific observations from real world jobs into universal improvements to how Box’s apps work. “The excruciatingly hard part of this is, you’re solving complex business problems that are very hard to abstract from the UX,” Levie says. The solution might look something like enterprise darling Slack. At heart, it’s a well-designed chat app, but it also cleverly incorporates other services that employees rely on, like Twitter and Google Docs. Creating apps that serve as hubs, instead of specific tools, might be one way to eliminate some of those seams.
To make all this happen, Batraski has formed bigger design teams within Box and aggressively shortened design cycles. “The team works like a mini agency, where you get the benefit of having seven to nine designers to help solve a problem up-front,” he explains. He’s also encouraged his designers to let emotion play a bigger part in guiding their work, and to take a more empathetic approach to understanding customers’ needs. “We live their problems, like how an actor trains for a movie,” Batraski says. Ultimately, the idea is to create something like the design studio at Apple, which puts designers in a concentrated group, as opposed to an approach like Google’s, in which designers are seeded throughout the company. The hope is that this core group will be able to create models for interaction that can be used throughout Box’s products.
Still, enterprise sales cycles are long, so it could be years before the bet pays off, if it ever does. “We’re going to try to push the whole industry forward,” says Levie. “We’re thinking of what the future of design could be. It’s a long term project.”
But Box thinks tectonic changes in the enterprise software market are working in their favor. Put simply, these days people expect technology to be easy to use.
“Before, the sales process was very different,” says Batraski, who sold his own enterprise startup, Adchemy, to Walmart earlier this year. “It was about solutions, with no consideration about how the end user felt. Nobody was asking: How often do they want to throw the monitor at the wall?” he says. “Now you have your iPhone, your Macbook. Your expectations have elevated so much in the consumer experience that it has become the de facto standard.”
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