Why and how to implement enterprise UX in the organisation
Demystifying a generally unknown problem space
What is Enterprise UX?
If the two words– enterprise UX suddenly ignited a certain sort of fear in you, don’t fret. We all feel it too. Enterprise UX is difficult. And certainly isn’t a bucket of fun for designers…
Enterprise user experience (UX) is the design of software that helps enterprise employees do their jobs more happily and effectively. It deals with software or solutions specially designed for the enterprise’s employees, not their customers.
In short, enterprise UX is the design of software that helps people do their jobs.
Such software can oftentimes come along with endearing qualities, namely: clunky, boring, and hair-splittingly complex. Still, employers hold on to outdated technology because replacing it just sounds too expensive. This actually provides the opportunity for designers to make life better for a huge group of people at once!
Why Enterprise UX matters.
Let’s take the example of a customer service officer’s workflow.
To solve an issue regarding a service plan, the customer service officer might first need to pull up the customer’s profile from the CRM, before proceeding to retrieve their current plan information from an entirely different platform. The whole process is tiresome and prevents the employee from doing his work efficiently.
Good enterprise UX would be able to streamline the entire process into a single tool resulting in:
- Shortened business processes
- More intuitive internal systems (with less room for errors)
- More efficient sales/customer service officers- improving customer experiences in the process
- A decrease in the need for employee training
To put data to this impact, Deloitte Consulting Principal, Paul Clemmons pointed out that incorporating usability into redesigning a client’s ERP system resulted in a:
- 300% increase in employee productivity
- 55% decrease in training time
- 21% improvement in upselling and cross-selling
How to approach the complexity
Five areas you should look at for your company to start using enterprise UX.
1. Create a UX strategy that identifies your project’s goal
Your UX strategy will ultimately boil down to why and how you’re going to implement user experience in your software — while of course, aligning with your business goals and IT constraints.
First, zone in specifically on your organisation.
What problem in the current software initiated the need for a UX strategy? What new goals are you aiming to achieve with the new strategy in place?
By understanding where exactly your company stands, you’ll be able to have a realistic view of what can be done.
Follow with an unbiased appraisal of the external environment — look at what your competitors are doing. Swoop in at opportunities taking the form of gaps they may not have seen or filled yet.
After your research, the UX strategy’s implementation phase begins. Keep the UX strategy brief as concise and as short as two pages long. Present the strategy brief to all your relevant stakeholders, making a clear case for why you need it and what would be achieved as a result.
After the rollout, make the strategy visible by evangelising it across the enterprise. As an organization’s adoption of a user-centric mindset is an ongoing process, you should be optimizing the strategy based on continuous feedback from users and iterative improvement. Feel free to tweak the strategy whenever the competition/market changes, or when new information comes to light during the testing phase.
2. Get everyone on board
Given that UX design is a cross-team effort, the first step to beginning any new project would be to make sure that everyone is on the same page. Implementation must be viewed as a high priority. If any decision-makers or end users don’t understand the objectives for the change, it may be met with resistance– negatively affecting your budget and resource-planning.
To address this, designers can:
- Promote an open house environment to communicate UX learning. Eg. Internal workshops to educate non-UXers about the core disciplines
- Define the need for change. Explain to management what would be delivered in measurable and tangible terms (like a meaningful business KPI or a leadership alignment plan) — how the implementation is aligned with the organisation’s priorities. And paint a clear picture to show the end-users how it will benefit their day to day workflows.
- Communicate the budget and resources needed to support the project beforehand. Determine the resource ramp-up plan and make sure everyone involved understands the commitment required from them.
This can all go a long way to reduce resistance and generate day-one endorsement for the implementation. At the end of the day, UX is still a technical project that needs the perspective of the end-users, as well as different people from different areas of the company.
3. Talk to the employees, not the board
Great enterprise UX begins with great research. Due to the inherent complexity of enterprise products, the research step is particularly important for the designer to truly understand end-users (in this case, the employees) and their needs.
At this stage, the designer should be understanding what people do in their jobs and how they do it. You might use a customer journey map to help with this part.
In your research, include:
- Clearly defined goals for the end-user experience
- Documentation of the features, functionality, and content that will support those goals
- A process for user testing throughout the development phase
- Planning that connects the business’s objectives with user needs
Understand which areas of the current software work for the end-users, and which don’t. Try to spot their improvised workarounds for failing features. Get end-users to talk about their processes and thoughts when interacting with the interfaces. All this research should help you imagine how an improved version of the workflow would look like — to help them do their jobs better and more efficiently.
Tests should be run to iterate upon feedback and validate high fidelity prototypes before moving on to the development stage.
4. Implement a UX workflow
With workflows differing from project to project, we’ll look at a basic UX workflow outline to keep to:
The UX team starts with creating and sharing UI libraries, templates and master documents to establish UX consistency throughout the project from the get-go. This takes away the hassle of getting the team on the same page. Jules Cheng shares about managing a practical workflow process within the design team here.
We then bring on the key users, getting an in-depth understanding of them, receiving feedback, iterating and validating high fidelity prototypes before moving on to the development phase. Business analysts can then create interactive screens on UI prototyping tools and validate requirements with key users to generate functional specification documents for the development team’s perusal.
To make the development team’s lives easier, such prototyping tools would reduce the complexity and endless functionalities that come with enterprise solutions. Developers would be able to quickly get the essential visual and functional specs for faster implementation.
5. Plan and deliver post-go-live support
Remember that once you go live, you still have a long way to go! For the project to be a success, end-users need to be confident and comfortable working with the newly implemented solution. For long term success, make sure you have a timely support touchpoint helping users climb the learning curve. Create a clear point of contact for questions and issues for at least a few weeks after the go-live. Schedule regular meetings with the project and support teams to raise issues quickly and provide proper direction.
To gain more organisational acceptance, celebrate “quick wins” to recognise and reward end users who achieve positive results or submit improvement opportunities.
Because this isn’t something that only happens once, let end-users know you’re always looking to enhance the solution. To really be user-centric in your workflow, each time the software is tweaked, ask yourself if the changes will really improve the employees’ lives.
Ideally have in place something similar to Google’s HEART framework to make sure you stay on track with the UX workflow.
Enterprise UX isn’t “sexy”, but who says it can’t be? If companies today understand themselves better, half the battle is already won. It ultimately enables the primary functions that run a company. And if implemented well, beholds the ability to make decisions that impact millions (or even billions!) of dollars in savings for your business.
