UX Process Need for Speed

Improving user research in the design of enterprise apps

Last weekend, I happened to be at a friend’s first meeting with a client. She is a freelance UX designer. The client said, “I have been involved in the process and I have a very good idea of what we need.” He proceeded to name 6 to 7 things he needed the solution to do. He then said. “Is it possible to have the designs in 2 weeks? I already have a volunteer developer, who is only available for 4 weeks in April.”

Now, this briefing felt very familiar. Anyone who designs enterprise apps, I bet, has had this very brief. Granted many more players are involved. The customer, much like the one above, comes with their version of the problem and what they need to solve it. Tech startups tend not to hire product managers who are typically more experienced and costly. And so this brief is passed on directly to project managers. A feature roadmap is put together and shared with the design team. But the designer goes, “Is this really the problem?”. I bet you know how that conversation plays out.

What is the source of conflict?

Enterprise apps seek to solve process problems for a company. The design of enterprise apps has always posed quite a challenge. The very definition of an enterprise app includes “…complex software…”. Simplifying this has been the biggest challenge for anyone involved. So what are the challenges I see?

Challenge 1:

The designer makes proposals through the eyes of everyone else except the end user. Between him and the end-user are business stakeholders. Business requirements gathering is equated to user research. Most tech startups skip the product manager in favor of project managers yet UX designers are given little time to do product discovery.

Challenge 2:

Designers are expected to keep up with the need for speed in product delivery. Customer requirements have always been “urgent”. While engineers have been assisted in delivering in record time, user research is squeezed out of its share. Designers have no time to revisit the overall experience. They are busy meeting “urgent’ feature requirements.

Challenge 3:

Unlike consumer applications, enterprise apps solve pretty much the same business process problems all in a bid to be efficient and effective in serving their customers. Yet, for every new project, designers spend several man-hours reinventing the wheel. Then developers, as well, develop for the umpteenth time, a customer management feature.

Humanitec sees it differently

In this article, I shall attempt to explain how Humanitec’s platform, Walhall, helps designers address the above challenges by accessing the end user early enough, meeting ever-tightening deadlines and, all the while, placating business stakeholders. This involves shifting the conversation from what I think my staff need, to “Why don’t I ask Mark, the accountant, who actually does this on a day to day basis, to try it out?”. Booyah!

The need for Walhall

Like many other software companies, all the challenges mentioned above affected our first product. The client wanted new features constantly, fixing existing features was a nightmare requiring refactoring large chunks of the monolith app we began with. The UX design process was reduced to producing wireframes as fast as was required. We, also, had no access to end users but we had lots of input like “I have been working in this capacity for years, I know what we need.”

A time reached when our customer was simply not able to use the app due to slow delivery and poor quality. The CTO was like, “Enough! We need to make this process nimble.” And so Humanitec began its shift, first into microservice architecture (MSA) and then to developing a rapid deployment platform for others to benefit too. We made a step closer to becoming truly agile.

Introducing Walhall

At Humanitec, we focus on building enterprise applications using microservice architecture. This is certainly a blessing for engineering teams — ease of building and maintaining applications, increased speed in development, and deployment among others.

Our core product, Walhall, is a rapid deployment platform that seeks to increase speed, quality, and efficiency of developing enterprise applications. It offers a marketplace in which development teams can use available logic modules, publicly share their own or manage their proprietary modules privately. Stringing together a fully functioning application with a back end, front end and interface takes less than 5 minutes. Click, click, wow!

Walhall’s potential value to UX designers

Because of this ability to create a sample application in record time, UX designers can begin their research by showing potential customers a working app of typical features they mentioned they needed. This means that this real feel app can be tested by their staff and the user research process can truly begin. Access to the real user only took a few minutes without incurring design time overheads. But, before starting any design process, targeting research to the user and his environment has been key. Yet, a generic sample app using modules, as proposed, calls for us to start discussing features. So why this suggestion?

We already mentioned the 3 challenges that designers of enterprise apps experience. And because of these, most designers start preparing solutions based on assumptions and poorly researched users and user journeys. More often they really do not have a full picture of what they are trying to achieve. The proposed sample app has dual roles — first, accessing end users to collect real insights and second, directing the conversation towards users’ needs and not only business requirements.

Building a sample app with Walhall

With microservice architecture now at the top of its game, Walhall is gathering quite some interest in software agencies and investor circles. Soon the marketplace will be full of logic modules from developers sharing their code in order to benefit from Walhall’s value offering. Your team can already start using Walhall with your already existing code.

I see two types of designers starting to grow out of the popularity of Walhall platform — those designing flows and interfaces for generic logic modules that others will use, and those who will continue to design for specific customers but will want to use the sample app as a user research tool.

The generic module designer

Secondary research here is your main tool since you are not particularly targeting a known customer. But you are targeting a known typical use case. Your process could look like this:

1. Research existing applications that have the same function as the module
2. Define a functional persona with the main use cases from your research. Select only cases common to all the apps you audited. The rest shall be added if required by a specific user.
3. Create an optimal module design that covers this functional persona. Designing testing and iteration are quicker since it is a small feature. Also, test participants can be anyone.
4. Apply UX best practices to reduce UX bugs in the sample app that will use your module.
5. Engineers, then, develop this module and make it accessible in Walhall’s marketplace.
6. Test the developed module to make sure it meets its expected goals before it is integrated with other modules into a sample app.

The customer’s designer

If you truly want the end user to benefit from what is being built, primary research, here, is not an option. But Walhall’s sample app could help make this process much easier than before especially for teams with limited resources. Your process could look like this:

1. Create a sample app using existing modules in Walhall’s marketplace from the requirements the customer/project manager has given you.
2. Approach the end user and see how he uses the sample app. This is your opportunity for hands-on research with end users.
3. Provide informed documentation. Your mapping artifacts will now be robust and useful. You will have data-driven discussions from the beginning reducing design by committee issues.
4. Target customer specific needs in the overall user journey and make recommendations to the original requirements. The effort it took to get to your first wireframe was merely a click, click, wow! You can focus on being innovative.

Conclusion

Humanitec offers a new way for UX designers to do user research by being able to generate a quick sample app through its platform, Walhall. It removes the obstacles of accessing real users that lead to assumptions which translate into real overall development costs.

The UX designer is expected to be a storyteller of the user’s successful journey through an app. However, current limitations in design process management and the need to keep up with speed to market have reduced a majority of them to wireframers than solution crafters. The role of the UX designer, with Walhall’s proposal, will help many designers become successful storytellers.

Follow our website to see this vision unfold. Encourage your developers to join Walhall.

¹The more logic modules your team adds to Walhall’s marketplace, the more complex the sample apps you will be able to build in a couple of minutes. Humanitec has added its own project management and field force management modules which are already in use.

Related reading: https://www.microfocus.com/media/ebook/let_ux_drive_devops_ebook.pdf