Hi, I’m Yuriy, co-founder and CEO of Cieden.

I’ve been looking forward to sharing this for a while—our team has released the first part of a long-awaited project: a Handbook for product designers working on enterprise applications.

Here’s a quick look at what’s inside and how it can help you.

What is the Handbook?

This handbook is a practical guide to designing complex enterprise applications—also known as business or B2B apps.

They are built for large organizations with complex operations, multiple stakeholders, and legacy systems to streamline and automate business processes. As a result, enterprise apps tend to have complex workflows, extensive permission management, high data security requirements, deep integration with other internal systems, and support for large data volumes.

To help you make sense of this, we structured the Handbook around Brad Frost's Atomic Design conception, which recommends building design systems from the smallest elements up. Similarly, we'll guide designers through the basics and gradually lead them to more complex topics.

What you’ll gain from the Handbook

We couldn’t find a single resource that covers enterprise app design from fundamentals to advanced topics. While there’s plenty of valuable information out there, it rarely focuses on enterprise applications and is often scattered.

So, we decided to bring it all together, providing a structured guide with:

expert insights from experienced designers;
real-world examples of enterprise-specific design challenges;
concise & detailed answers to common design questions;
videos & additional resources for deeper learning.

Each article addresses a question designers commonly face in their work. Every answer includes both a concise and a detailed version—both practical and to the point.

Our goal was to create a resource that designers can quickly reference for answers or use as a complete guide to designing complex apps.

We developed the first part of the Handbook in collaboration with our designers, who not only contributed their expertise but also shared the challenges they’ve encountered and the content gaps they’ve noticed.

Although focused on enterprise apps, the design principles covered apply to other types of applications, making it useful for product designers across different industries.