What Hawaii’s Emergency Alert reveals about Enterprise App UX

Everyone knows about the recent fumble, where a “user mistake” was the identified cause for a false Emergency Alert in Hawaii. What the most informed also already know is that the flaw is actually on the application experience that lead the user to make the mistake.

What kind of experience design was this application subject to? If we take most Enterprise Apps as example, none!

There are millions of internal applications hidden behind corporate firewalls which see no UX effort being put into it. One can understand why. There’s usually little budget for the app development itself, let alone user experience design. These apps do not benefit from an hefty marketing budget or get the spotlight of a big customer experience review initiative. In short, B2C apps get all the UX attention and little is left for B2E.

B2C vs B2E UX

There’s a reason why B2C apps get all the user experience design attention. Their battlefield is tough. User expectations are higher than ever. Customer’s tolerance level for bad user experience is at historical lows and it will get worse! When customers reject an app, that rejection is heard loud and clear in lost sales and customer churn.

But when the experience in B2E apps fails, the rejection is often muffled. The pains and frustrations of hundreds, or thousands, of employees is easily and swiftly ignored. This comes at a huge hidden cost for organizations.

What happened with Hawaii’s Alert System is just one of the consequences. Applications are more error prone. But they also lead to other serious problems.

An Enterprise UX horror story

The bad user experience cries are not always muffled. In a 2013 SAP implementation, the rejection was heard loud and clear. Avon rolled out a brand new implementation for its sales force and employees left by the hundreds. The system’s user experience was so bad, sales people quickly understood how it translated to lost sales and jumped ship. It was the first time the term User Experience appeared in the headline of big newspaper — in this case the Wall Street Journal.

The 5 consequences of bad B2E application UX

The consequences of lack of user experience design in B2E apps, and thus bad UX, are:

• Apps are more Error-Prone: users are more likely to make mistakes, as the application interface did not account for human nature, for one;
• User Frustration: frustrated users are tired users. Tired users make more mistakes, are less cooperative and sometimes boycott parts, or whole applications;
• No User Adoption: users when faced with an effort increase in their day-to-day often react aggressively, fighting the application as much as they can. But an organization can always force them to use it…
• Lost Productivity: if a task flow is not designed, it is easy to add a few page loads and clicks for task completion. When that task is multiplied by number of users, occurrences per day and number of employees it translates to thousands of lost employee hours;
• Data Corruption: when users are forced to use an uncooperative and inefficient interface they’ll make minimal effort, skipping non-mandatory fields, pushing the first possible selection or just aaa’ing it — you know, just writing “aaa”! Good luck with that machine learning strategy you got coming up!

Fighting for experience design in B2E apps

The user experience design investment in internal apps is often well worth it. And I hope this article can help to show it.

But how does one bring UX effort to internal apps?

1. Create a separate user experience design group focused on these applications - they can, and should, still collaborate with other groups, but their scope and goals are distinct;
2. Fight for mandatory budget percentage applied to UX activities, in app development;
3. For a long time, there will be a lot more developers and development teams than designers, so the level of awareness and capability of these groups needs to be raised — launch a training program.

I’ll write more about this UX revolution within development groups on later articles.

In the meantime, share this simple checklist with developers to put them in the right track: The Developer’s UX Checklist

This story is published in Noteworthy, where 10,000+ readers come every day to learn about the people & ideas shaping the products we love.

Follow our publication to see more product & design stories featured by the Journal team.